Movie Nation

The jokes and impersonations tip the hand of “Addicted to You.”

Cracks about “a modern day John Cusack” and Kate Hudson, “Never Been Kissed” and hearing “Helen Hunt’s voice in your head” (“What Women Want.” A stoned Matthew McConaughy impersonation. A character a little too INTO you too quickly?

“Does Aimee own ’27 Dresses?'”

Break it down for us sidekick David — “You’ve got yourself a classic rom-com.”

If only.

“Addicted to You” is a crude, laugh-starved and vulgar C-list copy-and-paste of “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” and proof of the thesis that if you’re going to steal, you might want to aim higher than a movie nobody EVER called a “classic.”

It’s built on that rom-com staple since Shakespeare’s day, two people lying about who they really are meeting and falling for the dishonest version of each other.

Luke — played by Florida wrestler-turned-actor Shane Hartline — is a 30something meme generator at Buzz Story, working with his bros Jackson (Choni Francis), David (Garrett Mendez) and Wendy (Tara Erickson), living by the credo old Uncle Doug (Alex Walters) taught him as a lovesick tween.

“Follow my one rule! ‘Thou shalt NOT fall in love!'”

Uncle Doug’s dead now, just like Michael Douglas’s Uncle Wayne in McConaughey’s “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.” Also not a classic.

The new flirt at work, Aimee (Cat Alter) hurls herself Luke, beds him, drops the “L” word the morning after, and blurts “I decided we could be good together, like Lucy and Ricky, or Sid & Nancy! Want to meet my MOM?”

That’s Luke’s trigger. He needs an out. What he and his pals come up with is “I’m a sex addict. I’m in recovery.” Funny thing, their boss (Warren Burke) is in “a group.” He understandingly drags Luke into it.

And another funny thing, Kara (Melissa Paulo) is a star writer at SNS Magazine, and her “Sorry Not Sorry” boss (Patricia Viletto) wants a story on dating a sex addict. Kara ends up undercover at that same support group.

I’ve used the phrase “funny thing” here hopefully, but that’s not accurate. The “meetings” are as artificial as their setting — on a high school theater stage (Hey, the lights were already hung, etc.). And the courtship that follows is just as contrived.

There’s a lot of riffing and comical crudity over everybody’s various shades of kink. The performers sound like improv veterans.

“I’m dating an emo. We’re working on penetrating…our FEELINGS.”

Everybody’s got a few go-to impersonations — Jack Black, Obama, Seth Rogen, Larry the Cable Guy. Team Luke gets messed up with an evening of 40 ouncers, “magic drops” and a five-apple bong. That turns them all into animated versions of themselves, Beavis and a lot of Buttheads.

Some players try WAY too hard (Francis co-wrote the script and hits his punchlines so hard he leaves a mark.). Others give us a taste of R-rated sitcom whimsy. David’s new hook-up (Ashley Crystal Hairston) is seduced with the old fake-wedding ring routine. And she’s all in.

“Brittany’s offering BUTT stuff,” David sings — improvising his own autotune as he does. “Buuuuuuuttttt stuff! It’s my ROSEBUD!”

As limp as the laugh lines are, when “Addicted to You” (“Addicted to Love” anyone?) turns sensitive and serious, the eye-rolling only gets worse.

Some of the “let’s fake how hot we are for each other” vamps are laugh out loud funny in a sort of over-the-top acting exercise way. Alter stands out in those moments.

Mostly though, this addiction is too easy to shake, a rom-com that’s content to reference “classic” rom-coms, without making the references funny or for that matter improving on them.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with frank sexual situations, drugs, profanity — mild violence.

Cast: Shane Hartline, Melissa Paulo, Cat Alter, Choni Francis, Ashleigh Crystal Hairston ,Garrett Mendez, Tory Devon Smith, Patricia Villetto

Directed by Mike Cochnar, script by Mike Cochnar, Choni Francis, SteevJBrown. A Leomark release.

Running time: 1:35

The shaggy dog — Ok shaggy Dude — comedy “The Big Lebowski” produced more memorable characters than most any cult film you can think of.

And any of them, played by Jeff or Julianne, John or Jon, was indelibly hilarious enough to merit a spin-off film, at least to fans.

Of course, the catch here is that any attempt to catch that lightning in a bottle 20 years later would probably turn out like “The Jesus Rolls,” John Turturro’s return to the cocksure Puerto Rican bowler with aggression, sex appeal and an accent to die for.

Sure, he’s unforgettable. Like several others in the film, he has his own catch-phrase — “Nobody f—s with the Jesus.” But take him out of his element and maybe the twenty years matter more and the film will seem creaky and winded.

It’s not a terrible idea to package Jesus with a fellow ex-con pal, Petey (Bobby Cannavale) and a cranky French hairdresser, Marie (Audrey Tautou) and put them on the road in a remake of Bertrand Blier’s “Going Places.” But every minute that The Jesus isn’t in a bowling alley Turturro and his movie lose a lot of what made him stand out.

That doesn’t mean “The Jesus Rolls” doesn’t come damn close to just skating by on the glories of that character and our memories of that movie. We meet him as he’s released from prison, and if you ever wondered what the unflappable Christopher Walken (playing the warden) looks like breaking character, he comes close here.

“SERVED your TIME, boy!” he twinkles, and almost loses it. He seems as delighted as we are at seeing Turturro back in Jesus mode. “Keep on BOWLING boy!”

For a moment, as Jesus exits the prison, we think we’re going to get a “Something About Mary” musical narration. Jesus, remember, doesn’t just have a look, an accent, a catch-phrase and a go-to move — licking his bowling ball before rolling. Jesus has his own music. The Gipsy Kings play him out, and they are literally in the prison with him.

Maybe Turturro couldn’t land them for transition shots throughout the movie, but this is inspired. And it’s the one moment in “Jesus Roles” that truly takes us back to The Dude and his abiding.

The rest of “Jesus Rolls” is mostly Jesus rolling. Petey picks him up at prison, they steal the first of many MANY vintage cars that they boost, and we’re off.

It’s a road comedy of criminal enterprises, comic mishaps and quaintly kinky sex. Once they’ve stolen that Plymouth Road Runner from the gun-toting hair dresser (Jon Hamm) and stolen his star stylist (Tautou), who has “history” with Jesus, let the threesomes begin.

A parade of cameos pass by — Hamm, Tim Blake Nelson, Sonia Braga as the Mother of Jesus, a hooker — “Steel in the game, at your age?” JB Smoove gets a haircut. Susan Sarandon is a female ex-con they pick up, stealing another car to give her a lift.

Jesus has a thing for Chrysler products — Road Runner, K-Car, Fury. The vintage Bentley doesn’t suit The Jesus.

The surprise focus here reminds me of the way “Big Lebowksi” kind of went off the rails for me — the sex scenes. There’s amusing nudity and a lot of switching partners and sharing and a faintly frustrated Frenchwoman who says “I sleep with everybody. That way, no one is jealous!” Jesus frets that “Ain’t no pleasure for The Jesus not to give pleasure!” Not much pleasure in the scenes, either.

The picaresque crimes are dull, the road “comedy” never develops momentum.

But one more moment brings “The Jesus” back to his natural habitat — a bowling alley. The Gipsy Kings (unseen, alas) play and sing a Spanish “My Way,” and there’s time for a tango, in bowling shoes.

This is The Jesus we want. This is the Jesus John T. should have saved.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, language throughout and brief nudity

Cast: John Turturro, Bobby Cannavalle, Audrey Tautou, Susan Sarandon, Pete Davidson, Jon Hamm, Sonia Braga, Tim Blake Nelson, JB Smoove and Christopher Walken.

Credits: Directed by John Turturro, script by John Turturro, based on Betrand Blier’s film “Going Places” and the character created by Joel and Ethan Coen. A Screen Media release/a Sidney Kimmel production.

Running time: 1:25

AT’s what I’m talking about!

Opens Friday in select cities. Because not everybody’s found The Jesus.
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Elisabeth Moss is on quite the roll. “Handmaid’s,” “Her Smell,” “Light of My Life,” “Us.” Showing us more of her thriller chops this time around. The trailers have all pointed to her doing a great job of muddying up our notion of whether this haunted-by-my-abusive-ex thing is “real” or all in her head.

“Saint Frances” is a sentimental and sweet, coarse and edgy comedy about childcare, abortion and finding adulthood at 34.

Intrigued? You should be.

Writer-and-star Kelly O’Sullivan has concocted a Greta Gerwiggish star vehicle that’s laugh-out-loud funny, blushingly crude and beautifully touching.

She stars as Bridget, a careless, distracted and somewhat adrift ditz whom we think is about to have an epiphany about all those things in the middle of a party. Then a random guy (Max Lipchitz) interrupts her and they wind up in bed.

It’s not until the next AM that she realized it was her “time of the month.” That’s so Bridget. And I’m being a lot more delicate than anybody in this movie is about bodily functions and having one’s period.

Jace — that’s the pick-up’s name — just rolls with it. Bridget figures this is the time for discourse on “bloodhounds” and making a very messy situation amusing.

She’s got a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Her job interview the next day is filled with such faux pas. A “fallen” Catholic, she’s been recommended by a friend to take her old job as nanny for six-year-old Frances, the daughter of two women (Charin Alvarez, Lily Mojekwu) who just had a little boy.

They may exchange looks that give away “desperate,” but Bridget’s tactless stumbles may be too much. Frances (Ramona Edith Williams) and Bridget don’t click, either.

“We’re done” the child blurts out. She does that a lot. And yet for all of that, cell-phone-distracted, “not much good with kids” Bridget ends up with the job. She has no idea what she’s in for.

The couple are strained, with Mommy (Alvarez) suffering postpartum and Mama (Mojekwu) a humorless workaholic.

Frances? She’s Mommy and Mama’s little unHoly terror. She badgers Bridget to bump her around in the stroller for thrills, then runs to her parents when she takes a tumble.

“She threw me out of the stroller!”

She’s not hearing Bridget’s “no sugar” repeat of her parents’ edict when the ice cream truck rolls by in the park. Her tantrum summons a cop, which was her six-year-old intention.

“HELP! She’s not my Mom! I don’t KNOW her!”

Bridget gets a bellyful of childcare hell and the downside of Mommyhood. She is dismayed at Mommy Maya’s decline from “funny, confident woman” to “bare-boobed unshowered perpetually-crying milk machine.”

Perfect time for Bridget to find out she’s pregnant, right? This is how she earned my “careless, distracted and somewhat adrift ditz” label. Her birth control isn’t even worthy of being called a “method.” She asserts herself as a feminist, with her “I’m for sure getting rid of it” to Jace. But like everything else, there’s a lot of “lazy” in her “I am woman”hood.

Poor Jace is younger, all empathy and “I know” at her every complaint. He’s doing his part “in our relationship.”

But “We’re not IN a relationship!”

And as if to prove it, Bridget goes all goo-goo eyes over Frances’ new toddler-guitar teacher/poet (Jim True-Frost).

All these complications, all this “feeling,” all this (literal) “messiness” is sprinkled with dialogue that will make you laugh or at least chuckle out loud when delivered by O’Sullivan. Guitar teacher says Frances is “a future Joan Jett.” Who’s that, the kid wants to know?

Rock star, “really angry — lots of ‘STATEMENT’ eye liner.” Pause. “Wonder if she’s dead now?”

O’Sullivan sells this woman’s embrace of not “having it together” with a performance on a par with Jenny Slate’s bracing and funny turn in the similarly themed and pitched “Obvious Child.”

Yes, abortion can be funny, even in a movie with lots of Catholics and Catholicism.

And then our heroine turns on a dime, letting this problem child get to her, developing empathy for Frances’ parents even as she’s clumsily making every mistake short of a fatal one with their kid.

Comedy is the most subjective film genre, and all this menstruation, abortion, Catholicism and Meeting Mr. Wrong won’t be to every taste. I found “Saint Frances” a real indie comedy shot in the arm (first-timer Alex Thompson directed). And I cannot wait to see what O’Sullivan comes up with next. Nothing that involves kids, I trust. For obvious reasons.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, adult subject matter and situations.

Cast: Kelly O’Sullivan, Ramona Edith Williams, Charin Alvarez, Max Lipchitz and Lily Mojekwu.

Credits: Directed by Alex Thompson, script by Kelly O’Sullivan. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:41

It looked like a “Star Wars” sandcrawler, armor-plated and on massive tracks.

It was welder and mechanic Marv Heemeyer’s masterpiece, 85 tons of unstoppable motorized mayhem. Because that’s what he built it for.

“Tread” is a tale of a small town feud taken driven to its diesel-powered coup de grace. It has an operatic, unbelievable, large-than-life/”only in America” quality. And if you don’t remember this moment in time from 2004, it’s because Ronald Reagan died the day after Heemeyer’s drive of revenge through Granby, Colorado, utterly obscuring this Great Moment in White Male Working Class Rage.

Using interviews, actual news coverage, reenactments and a rambling, cassette-tape manifesto by the welder run amok, filmmaker Paul Solet paints a portrait of working class grievance, “good ol’boy” cronyism and venality, persecution complexes and petty grudges that become epic. Its portrait of small town provincialism suggests that it should go straight from theaters and streaming to just the right TV network — RFD-TV — where some rural soul searching is in order.

Yes, the “hero” of the piece is plainly paranoid, messianic and wrong. But as Solet’s film cannot help but reveal, that old joke has a hint of truth about it.

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean everybody ISN’T out to get you.”

Heemeyer was an Air Force vet who stayed in Colorado after his service, using the welding and mechanical skills he picked up in the military to make a business — a muffler shop — and a life for himself in Granby, population 1800 or so — just over the mountain from Boulder.

He had plenty of friends, a sometime girlfriend and a passion — snowmobiling. His work was respected by all and he ran a successful welding business.

But to hear him tell it, in this long, multi-tape suicide note he left behind, he crossed the wrong “legacy” businesses and families when he won a place to open his shop at auction. It took a decade of perceived insults, zoning and sewage distract hassles and lawsuits that he saw as persecution for him to have his hot tub epiphany.

Buy a huge Kubota bulldozer at auction, turn it into a tank and make himself an avenging angel on treads. God told him to do it. In his hot tub.

“You people needed to be taught a lesson,” he explains, on tape. “When you visit evil on someone, believe me, it will be visited on you.”

The overarching theme of Solet’s film is that there’s no feud like a small town feud. Get on the wrong side of the wrong person, and you can’t help but make associations that every other problem in your life will connect to them. Because they have friends, and relatives. And those friends and relatives are on this board, run that town office, or are even the mayor.

People like the local newspaper editor became — in Heemeyer’s growing rage — sworn enemies. We hear Heemeyer’s accusations first, and then denials, which colors our perceptions about who might be right, who might not be right in the head.

Those he accused come off as genuinely puzzled, or leave the viewer with the suspicion, “Yeah, Heemeyer’s a hotheaded assh–e, but so’s this liar.”

“No one realized how distorted it was becoming to him,” Ski Hi News editor Patrick Brower admits, his business targeted despite his professed best efforts to be fair and keep on the good side of a disgruntled local business owner.

The last third of the documentary is devoted to news footage or painstaking recreations of the “killdozer” rampage, and let me blunt about that. It’s 85 tons of pure catharsis, served up as entertainment. Which it is.

Make this story about a gun-nut slaughtering innocents — which it could have been, given the setting, the culture and Heemeyer’s on-tank cannon (a .50 caliber rifle) — and there’s no way anyone in good conscience could take it this way.

Instead, we watch a methodical, mechanical nut, with grievances (possibly) real and imagined, destroy the property of those he figures have wronged him. A friend recalls a Vin Diesel movie the 51 year-old Heemeyer kept in his shop, “A Man Apart.” I left “Tread” certain he must have seen that James Garner Army comedy “Tank.”

We see footage of townspeople gathered on the hill overlooking the tank-tantrum, and we get it. They gawked as we gawked, as news viewers around the world gawked. Everybody likes to see machines run amok. You’re already headed to Youtube to check out the news clips or the movie trailer there.

Businesses destroyed, lives shaken to their core, the cars of bystanders crushed, cops helpless to stop it — it’s awful and tragic, sure.

But it’s something to see, man.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marv Heemeyer, his friends and “enemies” in Granby, Colorado

Credits: Directed by Paul Solet. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:28

“The Sower” is a French parable (“Le semeur”) with hints of “The Beguiled” about it, with more romantic and less morbid intentions. A couple of compelling leads and an intriguing source of dramatic conflict help it come off.

Soldiers on horseback thunder into an Alpine village and round up every man in the place. The shouts of the men and the screams of the women fall on deaf ears.

“It’s a ‘state of emergency,’ madame,” the officer declares (in French with English subtitles). “We can do what we please.”

The women must band together to keep themselves alive– planting and harvesting, tending livestock, repairing buildings. A leaky roof in the granary could mean starvation, so they rally to patch it in a driving rain.

They manage. But in Marine Francen’s vivid period piece (based on Violette Ailhaud’s novel), this beautiful pastoral setting quickly feels like a trap to the younger women caught there.

The primitive isolation of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1851 France, the repression that followed his coup, means they have no idea what is going on or whether their menfolk will ever return. Those younger women, left without their beloveds or without ever having a beloved, have needs.

The older women, led by midwife/matriarch Blanche (Françoise Lebrun of “Julie & Julia” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) fret over their daughters’ plight. The younger ones, such as Rose (Iliana Zabeth) and the virginal Violette (Pauline Burlet , the young Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose”), get down to brass tacks.

They speculate. Might there be men in the valley below? Is every man in France dead or deported? What happens if, say, a peddler or journeyman farm worker passes through? They will have to “share” and share alike, they decide.

Violette dreams of a hunk “like Adam in the Garden (of Eden),” young, with “buttocks round like apples.” They’re all having such “dreams.” But wouldn’t you know it, that’s not exactly who shows up.

Enter the handsome traveling blacksmith. The entire village is so shocked, some to the point of alarmed — “We get by, we are armed” one blurts out at his suspicious questions — that they don’t tell him their men have gone and forget to interrogate him.

It’s the kids who do that. His name is Jean (Alban Lenoir of “Taken”), he’s 39. And he only has eyes for Violette. That can only mean trouble.

The grim gravitas of that mass arrest opening hangs over “The Sower,” anchoring it in the realm of tragic romance from the start. There’s romance, but none of this randy romping with a piper to pay later that “The Beguiled” delivered. In tone, think Terrence Malick’s “The Hidden Life,” or going back further, “The Horseman on the Roof.”

Jean has a backstory. Violette is naive, but her peers, and the older women — especially her mother (Géraldine Pailhas) — order her to cozy up to Jean. They have a shared love of books in common. Will she fall for him? Will she keep the pact the others bound her to?

Francen has made a film that revels in the gorgeous pastoral detail and the sheer loveliness of the leads, which compensates for a story (many hands adapted the novel) that lacks that heart-tugging oomph that carries good screen romances.

“The Sower,” now streaming on Film Movement+, Apple TV and elsewhere, still makes a diverting and picturesque romance that will have you dreaming of a French vacation and the lovely sights — human and otherwise — to be seen there.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations and nudity

Cast: Pauline Burlet, Géraldine Pailhas, Alban Lenoir, Iliana Zabeth and Françoise Lebrun

Credits: Directed by Marine Francen, script by Marine Francen, Jacqueline Surchat and Jacques Fieschi, based on a novel by Violette Ailhaud. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:38

If you’ve ever pondered what the label “Southern Gothic” means in cinematic terms, “Blood on Her Name” is the very epitome of the genre.

From its evocative title to the working poor milieu of family loyalty, trailer parks, garages, roadhouses, crime and grinding “just getting by” Southern lives, it’s Gothic in a nutshell, first scene to last.

That opener, in the screenplay by Don M. Thompson and director and co-writer Matthew Pope, drops us right smack in the middle of it all.

A battered woman (Bethany Anne Lind) stands, gasping, over a body that’s bleeding out at her feet. He’s a goner. The size of the crescent blooded wrench confirms that.

And Leigh is gulping air and grasping at what to do next. Grabbing the plastic sheeting tells us she has some notion of what to do with the body.

“Blood on Her Name” is about what she considers, the steps she takes to cover her tracks and what she DOESN’T end up doing with the man she killed in the family car repair shop.

Leigh wears this life-and-death experience in the cuts on her face. And with the complicated life she leads, that’s a problem.

Explain it to her son Ryan’s (Jared Ivers) no-nonsense probation officer (Tony Vaughn). He doesn’t want to hear her “good kid” protests.

“I’ve been doin’ this a long time, Miz Tiller. ‘Good kids’ don’t end up here.”

Come up with something to tell her mechanic (Jimmy Gonzales).

Explain it away to her high-mileage sheriff’s deputy Dad (the wonderful Will Paxton).

“Livin’ with something like this is a son-of-a-bitch. But it’s livin’.”

And let her face be her prescription for her pill-peddling drug dealer.

“How much should I take?”

“How much trouble d’you want to get off your back?”

The dialogue is hard-bitten. The characters are worn down by worry, risk and bad choices. And the new bad choices take on baggage and a “code” that Gothic titans like Faulkner and Dickey and Flannery O. and ol’Tennessee Williams would recognize.

Kin and “closure” matter. Doing the minimal “decent” thing after doing the wrong thing is the least you can manage.

“Jesus kid, I’ve seen priests less hung up on old sins.”

Lind, of Hulu’s “Reprisal,” makes a gritty anti-heroine, somebody who has been through all the rough stuff this small town has to offer. Her ex is in prison, her Dad’s a cop, she runs a garage. Grabbing a grope at the honky-tonk is not advised.

Paxton is so on-the-nose as her redneck deputy dad that you can hear him and picture him without even seeing the movie.

And earthy Elisabeth Röhm, recently seen in “Bombshell,” makes a formidable good ol’gal whose man was the one Leigh “got dead.”

It’s not “Blood Simple” or “Cape Fear,” but “Blood on Her Name” makes a short, blunt and brutal addition to the Southern Gothic canon, a tasty and testy short story that spits out great lines and spills a lot of blood before all is said and done.

This is “Southern Gothic” that lives up to its name.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Bethany Anne Lind, Will Paxton, Elisabeth Röhm, Jared Ivers, Jimmy Gonzales.

Credits: Directed by Matthew Pope, script by Don M. Thompson and Matthew Pope. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:23

A little Munchausen by Proxy horror for Mother’s Day?

A24 has quickly developed a “house style.” Disparate filmmakers, differing subject matter, but man — look at a trailer and in a heartbeat you can tell this studio was behind it.

Dev Patel is the ruler who must face his greatest fear, “The Green Knight.”

Alicia Vikander and Joel Edgerton also star in this May 20 release, from the director of “A Ghost Story,” “The Old Man and the Gun,” “Ain’t them Bodies Saints” and, um, “Pete’s Dragon.”