Movie Nation

A common gripe about faith-based movies is how they’re so far sanitized that they’re removed from reality — real people in real situations having real conversations.

A romantic comedy about two people thrown together for a dance competition isn’t going to remedy that. But the song under the opening credits of “Faith, Hope & Love,” one repeated in the movie, jokes about “gin fizzes” and “booty-shaking.” So we’ll call that “progress.”

It’s a fizzy little comedy with a dollop of sadness and entirely too much “fizz” fizzed out.

It’s about a Christian widower (Robert Krantz) raising two girls and clinging to his advertising job by a thread. His littlest girl (Aria Walters) figures that setting him up with her ballet teacher for a “pros and schmoes” dance competition is just what he needs.

“They’re going to be dance partners and fall in love!”

The divorced dancer instructor, Faith (Peta Murgatroyd), is about to lose her studio and needs to win this competition, for the publicity and for the cash prize. She auditions male partners who fit the “schmo” (not a pro) definition, and in desperation settles on jokey, loosy-goosey Jimmy (Krantz).

Before you know it, they’re rehearsing and they’re sharing. He’s quick on the “Do you believe in God?” question, but he drinks a bit to drown his sorrow over losing his wife. She’s a tad bitter about her breakup and can’t figure out why she rarely gets past the first date — despite being a gorgeous blonde dancer with a Kiwi accent (Faith is an Australian emigre, Peta who plays her is from New Zealand).

Faith sizes Jimmy up like the outsider she is. “Shouldn’t you be saying something religious here? ‘What would Jesus do?'” She’s not being snippy. She’s just bought into the stereotype.

Jimmy tries to help her with her dating life, she has ideas for the career-saving pitch he has to make to a dating website, and they country dance, tango, hip hop (not really) and ballroom — rehearsing their way from her high school reunion to “the big contest.”

Krantz, trying WAY too hard playing a guy who tries WAY too hard to wring a laugh via slang and colloquialism, isn’t awful, although the script he wrote for this gives him and pretty much everybody else in the picture limited opportunities to shine or land a joke.

It’s a “formula” movie, start to finish. But the germ of a few good ideas are hiding out in that screenplay. Jimmy’s Greek (and Greek dancing) heritage makes its way into the picture well after the halfway mark. The actor-screenwriter was born Haralambos Karountzos and has been  in films, bit parts mostly, since the ’80s — for 35 years.

The Greek dancing scene is cute, the name he uses on the phone because nobody can spell “Elpidas,” his last name, is “Jimmy Hope.”

“Jimmy Hope — that’s what ‘Elpidas” means in Greek.

The kids are pretty much non-starters as characters, blandly-played to boot. Some dance numbers are cute (ish). And Krantz and Murgatroyd — yes, that’s a real name — have a little faith-based romance chemistry. He comes off as charming, which explains the picture’s healthy supply of star cameos.

M. Emmet Walsh plays his priest, Corbin Bernsen is Jimmy’s indulgently forgiving boss, Ed Asner is the oldest guy in Jimmy’s Bible study class and Michael Richards is the father of a dork (J. Chris Newberg) competing against our increasingly-close couple.

Not one of them have anything funny (enough) to do, although Richards does seem to relish wearing a cowboy hat.

With faith-based films, message often trumps other considerations, not a happy situation in most movie genres. “Faith, Hope & Love” gets the “faith” in, and the “hope” and even a hint of “love.” It’s the comedy that lets this romantic comedy down.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: Peta Murgatroyd, Robert Krantz, Corbin Bernsen, Michael Richards, Ed Asner, M. Emmet Walsh, Karen Y. McClain, Natasha Bure and Aria Walters

Credits: Directed by Robert Krantz, J.J. Englert, script by Robert Krantz. An ArtEffects/Netflix again.

Running time: 1:46

SOMEbody is targeting cops. SOMEbody (Chris Rock) is a veteran detective, rolling up on crime scenes in a vintage Camaro. SOMEbody is his new partner (Max Minghella).

And somebody is a little foul-mouthed and a little murderous.

A little “Saw?”

“Spiral” comes out in May.

In “Wendy,” the writer-director of the Oscar-nominated “Beasts of the Southern Wild”  transports the Peter Pan story from London and “Never Never Land” to the Louisiana bayou and the Caribbean island of Monserrat.

And he tinkers with the fantasy about “never growing up” and adulthood, adding an environmental allegory to its message in this latest richly-detailed fantasia on the imagination of children and the wonders they stumble into when left to figure the world out for themselves.

It is a movie of magic and (sometimes) messy messaging, of carefree play with never a worry about meals or tetanus shots — a lot like “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Wendy Darling (Devin France) grew up in the family diner, a whistle-stop so close to the tracks it’s but a short hop from rooftop to boxcar-top, for would-be daredevils.

As a toddler, Wendy crawled along the counters and learned to drop eggs on the griddle. Her future is set. Until her twin brothers (Gage and Gavin Naquin) come along, and one has the temerity to question the narrow confines of the life awaiting them all.

“I COULD be a pirate!” one brother declares, chastened when reminded of his outlook by elderly waitresses. “I don’t WANNA be no mop and broom man!”

Mother (Shay Walker) was once a hitchhiking hippy, and that makes the older sibling Wendy wonder just what’s out there. The twins interrupt netting turtles and taking turns at the swimming hole to share a vision she sees — a dreadlocked boy (Yashua Mack) cackling and leaping from boxcar to boxcar on a passing train.

That fires her storytelling imagination, and gets her brothers all worked up.

One day, the kids make the leap and they’re off, riding the rails with Peter Pan, who declares “This is an ADVENTURE! There are no stops” on this train.

He says this just before he shoves them off into the river as they cross a trestle (Don’t try this at home, kids.). And that’s how they board the rickety rowboat and set off for the mostly-abandoned, half-devastated volcanic island (Montserrat) where kids can be free and “never grow up.”

The others in their band are “lost boys.” Wendy? “She don’t stand a chance.”

A still from Wendy by Benh Zeitlin, an official selection of the Premieres program at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. All photos are copyrighted and may be used by press only for the purpose of news or editorial coverage of Sundance Institute programs. Photos must be accompanied by a credit to the photographer and/or ‘Courtesy of Sundance Institute.’ Unauthorized use, alteration, reproduction or sale of logos and/or photos is strictly prohibited.

Zeitlin leans heavily on his starlet, her co-stars and the arresting milieu that he drops them into for frolicking.And when that’s not enough, a little James M. Barry “Peter Pan” magic is in order.

Peter’s “never grow up” ethos is achievable, the lad insists.

“You have to believe” for starters, and as there’s no Tinkerbell, that’s within the realm of the possible. “Never slow down. Never think twice.”

There are stunning caverns to dive into, a wrecked fishing boat as playground, homesickness for Mother and awe at the wonders of Mother Earth. And there’s a lot of fretting about “never growing up,” and the perils that come with that, perils that might require “REAL help, from grownups!”

I love what Zeitlin is trying here, and one can understand, thanks to the fact that he announced this as his follow-up to “Beasts” way back in 2013, why he was reluctant to trim it to a breezier, brisker length.

“Wendy” drags through the middle acts, and the finale is something of a struggle.

But young Miss France is a beatific wonder — curly hair and earrings and what The Rolling Stones were singing about when they described “the girl with the faraway eyes.” Yashua Mack, another discovery, has the impish bravado to pull off Peter, although one wishes he’d had some funny lines to go along with his many elegies to “never growing up.”

That would have made “Wendy” a little more small-child friend and a little less of a slog.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief violent/bloody images

Cast: Devin France, Yashua Mack, Gage Naquin, Gavin Naquin, Shay Walker

Credits: Directed by Benh Zeitlin, script by Benh Zeitlin and Eliza Zeitlin. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:52

Victor Hugo wrote the original “Training Day.” Or so it would seem, in the Oscar-nominated French thriller that takes the title of Hugo’s most famous novel, “Les Miserables.”

The title comes from the film’s Montfermeil (suburban Paris) setting. It is where Hugo’s hero, Jean Valjean, met the poor and downtrodden Cosette, a place of suffering, poverty, and crime in Hugo’s 19th century, of crime and police harassment now, in the shadow of a school named for Victor Hugo.

The film’s harrowing, violent and sometimes moving story is another variation of a “new cop, first days on the job” police procedural — the “Training Day” formula.

Ruiz (Damien Bonnard, briefly in “Dunkirk”) has just arrived from the provinces. It doesn’t matter what the chief says, his SCU (Special Crimes Unit) sergeant, Chris — nicknamed “Pink Pig” — is the one who lays down the law, and the insults. The new guy is henceforth to be known as “Greaser.”

And what Chris (Alexis Manenti) says, goes. He and his longtime partner Gwada (Djebril Zonga) ride the district housing projects in an unmarked Peugeot. Not that “everybody” doesn’t know their car. They’re “pro-active” police, trying to keep a lid on an Afro-Arabic melting pot that’s always on the verge of boiling over.

“Like Miss France,” swaggering Chris cracks (in French with English subtitles), “all I want is ‘world peace.'”

To Chris and Gwada, that means showing the colors — stopping, frisking, hassling teen girls at a bus stop for smoking hash, leaning on tween to teen boys, but also intervening to do favors for “The Mayor” (Steve Tientcheu).

As a general rule, Chris is heavy-handed and rough, and Gwada, first generation French himself, goes along with it. Between these cops and the local Muslim Brotherhood, which stages non-violent interventions to scare kids back in line and urge their parents to better control them, the housing projects have enjoyed relative tranquility…since the last riots engulfed the place.

But two kids we meet early disrupt their “world peace,” test Pink Pig’s toughness and force the new guy — who is constantly counseling calm and “Easy, easy” during frisks — to come to terms with where he is and if he has a place there. The local adults, who resentfully tolerate the police, will be the wild cards, here.

Issa (Issa Perica) is a punk, his latest bust coming from stealing chickens from a local. Buzz (Al-Hassan Ly) is a bespectacled introvert whose nickname comes from his new — a camera drone. Issa has a mind for mischief, and Buzz is forever parking his drone outside young women’s apartment windows — videoing things he shouldn’t.

When a lion cub is swiped from a visiting Gypsy circus, the guys from the circus arm themselves with knives and clubs and turn the public address truck they’d been using to advertise their show into a cruising tirade of threats and demands for the cat to be returned.

The first fraught confrontation facing this SCU team is throwing themselves between Gypsies screaming racist curses and threats at the Mayor and his neighbors. One wrong move, or one clumsy bit of miscommunication (the Gypsy “king” — Raymond Lopez — is too enraged to be coherent) and they’ll have a riot on their hands.

Finding that cub will keep the peace, and that entangles the SCU, the Mayor and an ex-con who has deepened his devotion to Muhammed — the serene but menacing Salah (Almamy Kanouté). Tactics, tact and the lack of it will be hurled into this decaying situation with the threat of violence hanging over every confrontation, even every negotiation.

Ladj Ly (“Go Fast Connexion”) adapted his streetwise short film about these characters and this neighborhood into a feature-length story, and makes the suspense almost unbearable even as the movie takes us into situations we’ve seen many times and characters we know by many names — usually not French.

The film begins as a sort of “The French Way” essay in non-lethal police confrontations. The cops are just as testy, can be short-tempered and intolerant, as police come off — at times — in the U.S. But nobody is quick to pull the trigger, and police veterans and newcomers seem willing to risk being injured and loss-of-face to de-escalate tense situations.

With mass violence always in the back of their minds, these cops rely on a shock-and-stun weapon, the flash-ball, to back crowds off and intimidate their criminal adversaries.

But “Les Miserables” shows how those efforts can come to naught, or go terribly wrong. Ruiz may be judging the hard-boiled men he is thrown-in with, taking pains to keep his humanity and ethics. He openly wonders if their “tough” tactics are bearing ugly fruit. But even he sees the flashpoints they’re constantly dealing with, the terrifying situations that make survival instincts kick in.

And the locals? The “Us vs. Them” mentality the cops foster might fester, even without police hassling. But lax parenting is allowing teeming masses of teens to roam and get into macho mischief which can lead to bigger crimes.

But fence-straddling point-of view and well-worn story beats aside, Ly has crafted a tight, gimmick-free thriller that begins with a France united by a World Cup victory, and ends with a culture as divided — by class, means and want — as Victor Hugo saw it way back in 1862.

The more things change, the misery stays the same.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, some disturbing/violent content, and sexual references

Cast:Damien Bonnard , Alexis Manenti, Djebril Zonga, Issa Perica, Al-Hassan Ly, Steve Tientcheu, Almamy Kanouté and Raymond Lopez

Credits: Directed by Ladj Ly, script by Ladj Ly, Giordano Gederlini and Alexis Manenti . An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:44

Warners has been showing this one for a week or two, but reviews are embargoed until noon today I think

My market isn’t seeing it until tonight. As Margot/Harley Q was the only viable element of “Suicide Squad,” we have cause for guarded optimism.

See? This is what happens when we don’t give Amy Adams tje Oscar she’s deserved for YEARS.

Julianne Moore and Gary Oldman have been there. Hope they commiserated with her, because Amy pulls out all the stops on this dressing down turn, based on the hit novel.

It’s like “Queen & Slim” with LAUGHS

Issa and Kumail, a real action comedy love match? Works for me. April

Just who are we meant to root for in Corneliu Porumboiu’s “The Whistlers?”

Is it Cristi (Vlad Ivanov), the deadpan, corrupt Romanian cop yanked hither and yon — from Bucharest to La Gomera, in the Spanish Canary Islands — by the demands of his job and the mobsters he’s mixed up with?

Might it be Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), the perfectly-named femme fatale. Money and a man might be on her mind, but she’s a little too knowing and too quick to take on the guise of a “high class prostitute” to trust.

Perhaps Magda (Rodica Lazar), the head of Bucharest narcotics? She at least seems incorruptible. But we all have a price.

We can’t root for Paco (Agustí Villaronga), the mob boss who sets this convoluted caper in motion, all to get back “my right arm,” Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea), who has been nabbed for money laundering.

Damn. We could pull for Kiko (Antonio Buíl), the mobster and Canary Islands native who undertakes teaching not-that-hapless Cristi “the whistling language,” a within-earshot code allowing you to spell out words and pass messages without a police-traceable cell phone.

“Poot your finger like-a-thees,” he starts, demonstrating how to get the right whistle. He doesn’t speak Romanian, Cristi doesn’t speak Spanish, and his Eeeengleesh if very Chico Marx. “Like eet ees a gun you poot in your mouth!”

That’s almost the only overtly comical thing in this bloody-minded “Blood Simple” style dark “comedy. That, and the guy (István Teglas) who runs the mob-friendly motel called “Opera.”

You can hear everything from Offenbach to “O Fortuna” once you walk in the door. “Doesn’t that chase off customers?”

No, it “educates them,” as if that needed explaining.

The creator of “12:08 East of Bucharest” serves up a convoluted caper-with-killings tale about a prison break, payoffs and double-crosses upon double-crosses.

Cristi is brought to La Gomera, told to “forget about what happened in Bucharest” and learn this tricky, intricate language as if his life depended on it.

Because it does. We see him punched and held under water, threatened and pursued by his mob connection and his cop colleagues.

“How did you end up like this?” his devout mother wants to know.

So do we. But as the chapters — named for various characters and “The Whistling Language” unfold, we get a load of Gilda and we sort of understand.

“Sort of” because the movie is a lot murkier than it should be, losing itself in traveling scenes through lovely Canary and seedy Romanian scenery, in lots and lots of rooms “under surveillance” and relationships that bend so out of shape that some are not who they seem.

And through it all, through near-drownings and near-riches, money lost and a duplicitous woman found, Ivanov never lets us guess how hapless and helpless or cunning and competent Cristi might be.

“The Whistlers” is that rare cops-and-criminals picture that gives us a little to chew on and a new skill to practice — whistling.

“Poot your finger like-a-thees, like eet ees a gun you poot in your mouth!”

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, bloodshed, explicit sex

Cast: Vlad Ivanov, Catrinel Marlon, Rodica Lazar, Sabin Tambrea, Antonio Buíl,  Agustí Villaronga and István Teglas

Credits: Written and directed by Corneliu Porumboiu. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:37

What kind of man parks a piece of evidence — the car whose owner died when he was dropped 20 stories onto its roof — in the police impound lot, sees that car turn its lights and ignition on, engine revving, and stands right IN FRONT of said car peering through the headlights in the gloom as that engine revs?

A DEAD man.

The 1977 horror tale “The Car,” about a possessed auto, which Stephen King ripped off for “Christine” (1983), is back for “The Car: Road to Revenge.”

Different killer car, a modified Chrysler 300 with gullwing doors badged as “Lazarus” for this futurescape. Gearhead horror fans may spy a metallic connection to the original film, but anyway…

In a hellish cyberpunk future hell — Bulgaria. Bulgaria is hell — an arrogant, crusading DA (Jamie Bamber) gets his hands on some evidence on a microchip, and is murdered by “Road Warrior” extras — tossed out of a Bulgarian high rise.

His ex (Kathleen Munroe) becomes the object of the gang’s murderous search, who call her “Little Miss Needs-to-Die.”

The stubbly, tough-guy cop on the case (Grant Bowler) wonders if she had something to do with the DA’s death. Or maybe the murders that the damned car starts carrying out.

“Look man, am I a WITNESS, or a suspect?”

“Depends on who’s driving that car!”

There’s a lot of bloodshed in this lawless land — again, Bulgaria today, the rest of the world tomorrow. A lot of chasing, tires squawling, engines racing, good guys and bad guys trash-talking in cage match bars and strip-club cage bars.

Some lip service is paid to “self-driving cars” and a CPU that could decide to maybe avenge its owner (Is that in the warranty?), but only lip service. As always, this car is haunted.

The violence is sudden and gruesome — blow torch torture, power drill torture. The bad guys are awfully quick to dispatch people they allegedly need to “question” to get that plot device “chip.” No wonder they’re not getting anywhere.

It’s as dreadful as it sounds, although I’ve seen worse. The car chases are second rate and the car itself — black or not — isn’t remotely as sinister as the Lincoln of “The Car” or the Plymouth Belvedere of “Christine.” That’s a function of how it is filmed and edited.

John Carpenter filmed “Christine.” John Carpenter was the master at making something menacing.

This? See it if you’re contemplating a cyberpunk tour of Bulgaria.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Grant Bowler, Kathleen Munroe, Nina Bergman, Micah Balfour, Jamie Bamber, Martin Hancock and

Credits: Directed by G.J. Echternkamp, script by Michael Tabb. A Universal/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:29

Is “The Lodge” the most disturbing thriller of the year? Judas Priest, I hope so.

Dark and despairing, grim and gripping, it’s not necessarily shocking. It doesn’t live or die on its “big twists.”

But it gets in your head and messes around there. Just as it was designed to do.

I can’t remember a horror movie that left me as gutted as this one.

A family has been broken. Dad (Richard Armitage) has moved out. Mom (Alicia Silverstone) weeps and struggles to put a brave face on.

But the kids (Jaeden Martell, Lia McHugh) can tell. And then “broken” becomes “shattered.”

She raised the kids Catholic, and Dad faces down the avalanche of blame he’s due with utter denial. Pack your stuff, we’re going to “the lodge,” the family’s place in the frigid mountains. Grace, “the other woman” is coming.

They’ll “have some fun, get to know her a little better.”

Is he nuts? “You left Mom for a PSYCHOPATH!” Kids and their “Googling” of Dad’s paramours.

Aidan (Martell, of “Knives Out”) subjects little sister Mia (McHugh) to Internet footage of Grace’s past — “found footage” of a cult she was in.

And what do cults do? Aside from swoon over extremist political candidates?

So it isn’t just the fact that Grace is played by Riley Keough, who could be Mom’s younger, less-blonde sister, that wrecks this weekend.

It isn’t just journalist Dad’s insane abandonment of the three of them, and Grace’s little Maltese, Grady, “for work” in the dead of a very snowy winter.

It’s the kids-hate-Dad’s-new-love/kids-research-her and conflicting dogmas that drive the strife and the action — Catholic kids vs charismatic Christian cultist, children clinging to their lost mother vs Dad’s ready replacement for her.

Silence is something that’s rare in modern life, but not in the most chilling horror movies. Music-free car rides, a TV that’s rarely on (except to watch “The Thing” or “Jack Frost,” equally creepy), a big, echoey wooden two-storey surrounded by sound-muffling snow.

Things go bump, crucifixes and icons tumble and things turn chilling and…interesting.

Keough carries the weight, here, as the story is from her point of view. Is she losing it? Is her past catching up with her in a supernatural way?

Mia has a dollhouse version of “The Lodge” back home, but the existence of that doesn’t give away where this is going. Much. Martell doesn’t have to try hard to suggest pale-sullen-stalker OR withdrawn, brokenhearted son.

Like him, the movie could go either way.

Austrian co-directors Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz (“Goodnight, Mommy”) keep the light low and the camera lower — emphasizing the ceilings closing in, the lodge dollhouse’s unerring mimicry of the real lodge’s construction.

But isn’t production design or great narrative artifice that gives “The Lodge” its wrenching effect. It’s the sense of loss, the idea that it’s not shared at the same intensity, that “life goes on” can be the cruelest response of all.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence, some bloody images, language and brief nudity

Cast: Riley Keough, Jaeden Martell, Lia McHugh, Richard Armitage and Alicia Silverstone

Credits: Directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, script by Sergio Casci, Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz.  A Neon release.

Running time: 1:48