Movie Nation

The Best International Feature Film Oscar, formerly titled “Best Foreign Language Film,” is going to Korea’s “Parasite” this year. Bong Joon Ho’s social satire is the closest this thing year’s Academy Awards have to a sure thing.

But Poland’s entry in the category, “Corpus Christi,” is a minor miracle in and of itself. Warm and faith-affirming, predictable — with just enough edge — it’s a bracing delight in the middle of decades of stories of Catholic Priests Behaving Badly.

Daniel (Bartosz Bielenia) is a hollow-eyed, hollowed-out young man finishing up his term in a Polish juvenile detention center. He goes along to get along with the awful routines there, standing watch while the prison toughs carry out sexual assaults, dreading the return of a thug who has a murderous grudge against him.

Sunday morning Mass is his break from routine. Father Tomasz (Lukasz Simlat) lets him help set up the service and relies on him to sing the Twenty-third Psalm every week.

But that dream Daniel has about the seminary is misguided, at best. He’s not the type, we think. Father Tomasz reminds him (in Polish, with English subtitles) that “no seminary takes ex-convicts” like him. No, the job at a distant sawmill is the best he can hope for upon release.

As if to make the good Father’s point, Daniel swipes a clergical collar, shirt and outfit when he checks out. He ducks into town long enough for a sex, drugs, punk-rock and booze binge, and boards the bus.

But his long walk from the bus to the mill lets us see his despair at this future. Everybody he meets guesses his story — ex-con, sawmill bound. His quick look-over the place firms his resolve that it’s not for him.

Becoming a fake priest? That happens by accident. He ducks into the local church, misses the final mass of the day, and when the pretty daughter (Eliza Rycembel) asks him what he does as he assures her he is NOT working in the mill, he improvises.

“I’m a priest.”

“And I’M a nun!”

Nothing impresses the ladies like a collar. Father uh, TOMASZ he calls himself, lying just well enough to pass muster with the aged vicar (Zdzislaw Wardejn), who basically invents his story with the questions he asks”Father Tomasz.”

He’s just out of seminary, and he’s on a wandering pilgrimage through the parishes of Poland. Come, help me with mass. Hey, I’m not feeling well, take confessions for me, wouldya?

Director Jan Komosa and screenwriter Mateusz Pacewicz trot Daniel and the viewer through a lot of predictably adorable “learn to be a priest on the fly” gags — Googling “How to take confession” on his smart phone, etc.

But Daniel, who won’t talk about why he was in prison, told this lie for a reason. You can’t call it a “calling,” but something about the robes, the responsibilities and the power of the position intoxicates him. As he’s parroting the last sermon we heard Father Tomasz give to the inmates in the prison, Daniel gets carried away.

And so does “Corpus Christi.”

Because for all the lighter touches, the predictable stations of the cross of such movies (fear of discovery, romantic temptation, “tests”), this is a town still in mourning for a terrible car accident that took several of its young people.

People are hurting, and hurting each other with blame. Daniel’s tossing common sense in the Confessional, and at Mass. How hard can healing this rift be?

Bielenia beautifully pitches his performance to match Daniel’s state — hollow-eyed and hollowed-out at first, with the ex-con’s avoid-eye-contact condition —  beatific, self-righteous and cocky as the circles clear up under his eyes, he finds his purpose and starts to flex his priestly muscles.

He’s “the cool young priest” who can drink beer and smoke with “the kids,” and he’s noticing the lovely, sad Eliza (who lost friends in the wreck) noticing him.

I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, strong sexual content, profanity, alcohol abuse and smoking.

Cast: Bartosz Bielenia, Aleksandra Konieczna, Eliza Rycembel

Credits: Directed by Jan Komosa, script by Mateusz Pacewicz

Running time: 1:55

Lisbon’s slums are the backdrop for a Pedro Costa’s acclaimed story of a woman from the Cape Verde Islands searching for traces of her late husband in this Feb. 20 release.

“The Gentlemen” is vintage Guy Ritchie, an old-fashioned/new-fangled mob tale of the “Snatch,” “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” Cockney comedy with lots of killing thrown in.

None of this “Aladdin” nonsense. It’s “RocknRolla” — the entertaining but weak third film in his early gangland trilogy, and most apt comparison here — all the way.

Ritchie’s rounded up a lot of folks who can act tough and handle funny — Charlie Hunnam, Eddie Marsan, even Michelle Dockery (“Downton Abbey”), with an Irishman (Colin Farrell), an American (Matthew McConaughey) and a couple of reinventions. Hugh Grant tosses aside a lifetime of forelock-tossing, stuttering, posh romantic leads and turns amusingly sinister, or attempted sinister. And Henry Golding dodges the Hugh Grant bullet by ditching the “Crazy Rich Asians/This Christmas” fey romantic lead rep for a badass turn, playing a hothead named Dry Eye.

Oh yeah, there are some screwball street names — Lord George, The Coach, Trigger, Lord Snowball, Phuc and so on.

It’s built on slang and banter — pages and pages of plot and recitative, characters telling their portion of the story, making mob gorilla threats and introducing snippets of British street-speech to the larger world.

“When the Silverback gets more ‘silver’ than ‘back, he’d best move on. Before he gets moved on.”

All that speechifying slows down the works.

“Gentlemen” takes-an-entirely too-leisurely stroll through Brexiting Britainnia and the coming Legalization of Pot (“Bush,” over there, “cup of tea,” “white widow super cheese.”

It’s a marvel to listen to. But man, is there a lot of listening to do. And listening.

The story is framed in a blackmail pitch by sniveling private eye Fletcher (Grant), a verbose and probably-gay hireling of the UK’s notoriously vindictive print press. He’s strong-arming Ray (Hunnam) a top mob lieutenant to American-born/Oxbridge educated Pot King Mickey Pearson (McConaughey).

The third-year-film-student conceit to this “pitch” is that Fletcher presents his blackmail-worthy revelations as a screenplay he’s written that he expects Ray’s boss to pay a fortune to suppress.

Student filmmakers make movies about wanting to make a movie. Not that Fletcher is all hellbent to make it. The £20 million pounds he wants to NOT make it would work, too.

Fletcher, winking and flirting (Ray may be gay, too and UNinterested — adds some frisson to their scenes) through this pitch in Ray’s tony suburban designer house.

He knows Mickey is looking to sell out his Britain-wide pot network, lays out how Mickey has circumvented Britain’s land-shortage and land-“rambling” rights nationwide — Who could hide a grow farm in all that traffic? — and how he and his “Cockney Cleopatra” (Dockery) have their price and an American “Jew” buyer (Jeremy Strong).

But the Chinese mob run by Lord George (Tom Wu) and fronted by murderously ambitious Dry Eye (Golding) want in.

And then there are the brawling, boxing rapper-wannabes of the gym run by The Coach (Farrell). They’re black.

Ritchie has cooked up a racial stew of Cockney rhyming slang, spit-out rap lyrics, racist Chinese pidgin English wisecracks and veiled anti-Semitic jokes for this story of a rushed sale in “the puff game (pot)” before “the new gold rush” begins, with pot legalized with whoever controls Mickey’s empire having the leg up on the big, new market.

Landed gentry and their heroin addict kids, a boorish, crude and vengeful newspaper editor (Marsan), movie mogul, illegal firearms, from “paper weight” size to military-grade and lots and lots of funny lines dress up a story of social or underworld insults and the mob war that spins out of that.

So much bartering — “Unlike salt and pepper, it’s not on the table.” — much of performed by McConaughey, who drawls like an American who’s picked up the “you lot” affectations of Brit-speak.

And all this lawbreaking, with nary a bobby in sight.

“In France, it’s illegal to name a pig ‘Napoleon. But try and STOP me!”

It’s all so witty and quotable, with interruptions for the old Guy Ritchie ultra-violence and dark sexual kink, with shots aimed at the British press and British aristocracy and a whole lot of “foreign” people of color being fended off by white Brits and an American transplant.

Very “now,” in other words. Ritchie papers over a paper-thin story with artificial twists and very funny turns by the likes of Farrell, Grant, Marsan and Dockery.

He gives us a lot to chew on as text, and disturbing (Racist?) subtexts. And when the movie’s forward motion is as halting as a Hugh Grant stutter, we have entirely too much time, in mid-movie, to chew on it.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout, sexual references and drug content

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, Colin Farrell, Eddie Marsan, Jeremy Strong and Hugh Grant

Credits: Written and directed by Guy Ritchie. An STX release.

Running time: 1:53

Oh, how we’ve missed that Nic Cage. You know the one — bug-eyed and manic, screaming and profane, scary, unstable and violent.

The B-movie king is in rare form in “Color Out of Space,” a sci-fi thriller that might have been titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Magenta” had horror icon H.P. Lovecraft been born a lot later, and — you know — had a sense of humor.

It’s a sci-fi/horror tale put in the hands of Richard Stanley, a horror icon in his own right, thanks to the 1990 cult classic “Hardware.” There are images, sequences and laughs from that one-man-against-a-cyborg in a tiny, dumpy future apartment that stick with you years after you see it.

“Color” is far grimmer going, a disturbing genre piece that might have felt ahead of its time as a 1927 story, but feels like over-familiar ground now. What this one leaves you — OK, ME — with is suffering, a horror of hopelessness with no chance of catharsis.

The shrieks and screams of humans and animals are as pervasive as that “color” emanating from the meteor that arrives on a remote farm and kills or absorbs all that come in contact with it.

Teenaged Goth Lavinia (Madeline Arthur of TV’s “The Family” and “The Magicians”) likes her Lovecraft, keeping a copy of his “Necronomicon” in her farmhouse bedroom. We meet her casting a spell to save her mother (Joely Richardson of “Red Sparrow”) from cancer.

Ward (Elliot Knight of “How to Get Away with Murder”) is the outsider who comes upon her, her artist-dad Nathan (Cage), stoner science-nerd brother (Brendan Meyer) and kid-brother (Julian Hilliard) on their farm sitting on a watershed hydrologist/narrator Ward is surveying.

Nathan has brought them back to the farm to raise livestock. It’s just the sort of livestock you’d expect Nic Cage to herd.

“Now, if you don’t mind, I think it’s time to milk the alpacas!”

The Gardiners are good and stressed before the magenta blob crashes in their yard. This being Lovecraft, that triggering event doesn’t bring good news, good times or a bright future to any involved.

Tommy Chong, in another bit of on-the-nose casting, plays the elderly hippy squatter Ezra, living on the edge of the property. He’s analog in a digital world, and he’s got tapes he’s making after the crash.

“What exactly am I supposed to be listening for?” Ward wants to know.

“The people under the floor, Dude. The aliens!”

Weird things start growing, that color turns up in the light, the fog and the eyeballs of people and critters. Awful things tend to happen to the nicest people after that. And Nathan — as mentioned earlier — goes off in that special Nic Cage way.

Stanley’s career never really recovered from his participation, as writer and uncredited co-director, in “The Island of Dr. Moreau” diva-fest debacle undone by Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. We all love a comeback, but this one is grim going and something of a drag, when all is said and done.

But it captures the essence of Lovecraft in a couple of important ways. The unpleasantness grows and grows, and logical solutions and escapes are removed, one by one. That shows that the South African filmmaker should be welcomed back out of the wilderness, perhaps with Nicolas Cage as his new muse.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual situation, profanity

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Elliot Knight, Brendan Meyer, Q’orianka Kilcher and Tommy Chong

Credits: Directed by Richard Stanley, script by Scarlett Amaris and Richard Stanley, based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:51

I can’t be the only one who is over zombies. Totally.

Over-exposed, slow-walking or sprinting, George A. Romero “Living Dead” or TV “Walking Dead,” just enough already.

But if you see one zombie movie this year, here’s the one to catch — “Zombi Child.” It rips this Haitian curse out of Hollywood cultural appropriators and puts it back in Haiti, back in the realm of voodoo, where it belongs.

Writer-director Bertrand Bonello (“Saint Laurent”) conjures up a tale with Haitian history, European exploitation, ethnography, race, and voodoo. He weaves three storylines through two settings — Haiti and an exclusive French girls’ boarding school.

And while there are horrors — reserved for late in the third act — it’s everything that comes before that makes “Zombi Child” fascinating.

In 1962 Haiti, we see only a man’s hands as he guts a spiny blowfish, grinds up its entrails with herbs and dusts a powder into a pair of penny loafers.

We see a  young man (Mackenson Bijou) wearing those loafers walk, stagger, collapse and “die.” And then damned if he isn’t dug up and hauled off as slave labor, cutting cane on a sugar plantation.

In the present day, Fanny (Louise Labeque) is a member of the French ruling class ensconced in an exclusive boarding school founded by Napoleon himself. All the girls wears red sashes and have this odd hands-crossed way of reverse bowing in respect to their teachers, et al. Napoleonic?

Fanny writes long, poetically purple and passionate letters to her amour, Pablo, a long-haired motorcycling teen she’s obsessed with. Among her classmates, she is most taken with the new girl, Mélissa (Wislanda Louimat). She is black, from Haiti, and she’s in this school because her mother won the Legion d’Honneur for service for France, Haiti and humanity.

Fanny likes that Mélissa dances “like Rihanna.”

“Walmart Rihanna,” one of the mean girls in her sorority snipes (in French, with English subtitles). Even in France, Walmart is a put-down.

But this club is “a literary sorority.” So “Who cares how she dances? Is she cool enough to hang with us?”

Can she pass the initiation? That involves sneaking off with the others, lighting a lot of candles, and reciting a piece of literature, from memory, that says a lot about her.

Mélissa isn’t all that “cool,” but she’s the very essence of “black girl magic.” She tears off a poem, “Captain Zombi” (a real poem) full of fire and fury for the “white world,” reminding it of African contributions to life, work and ethnicity. “Black blood runs through your veins!” Weird she may be (“Hear my zombi ROAR!”), the schoolgirls are suitably impressed.

Bonello shows us the rites and rituals of this exclusive school, including ones the “sorority” girls make up for their group, intercut with the funeral rituals of Haiti, and the commune-with-the-dead incantations of Mélissa’s aunt (Katiana Milfort), her lone surviving relative who tutors and does odd jobs to keep them afloat in France, and practices voodoo as a“mambo.”

And we follow the further adventures of the living dead man enslaved on a sugar plantation way back when.

It’s an utterly immersive Franco-Haitian gumbo, complete with flashbacks, “magic” as practiced by those who know “the old ways,” teen hormones and the zombi origin story.

That’s the point of entree for a horror fan — seeing where Haitian myth, magic and ritual were appropriated and twisted into the dead who feast on the living — lurching and rotting their way through half a century of movies and TV shows inspired by “Night of the Living Dead.”

It’s not the scariest zombi or “zombie” movie ever. But are any of them scary any more? Bonello uses the subject as his jumping off point for exploring what all this undead stuff is really about and how the “white world” has been messing around with it for cheap frights and corpse make-up entertainment.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, brief nudity, profanity

Cast: Louise Labeque, Wislanda Louimat, Katiana Milfort, Mackenson Bijou

Credits: Written and directed by Bertrand Bonello. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:43

Britain’s funniest comedy troupe just lost one of its most reliable laughs.

Comic, director, mustache-wearer, cross-dresser, Medievalist, history buff and wicked wit Terry Jones has died.

Time to rewatch “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” which he decreed and directed and co-starred in with Eric Idle, John Cleese, Michael Palin,Terry Gilliam and the late Graham Chapman.

Lovely man. Got to interview him about “Life of Brian” when an anniversary edition DVD came out some years back. That interview is reprinted below.

A real polymath, curious about the world, remembered for his laugh, his lisp, his dresses and his many enthusiasms.

He died just days shy of his 78th birthday.

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Guy Ritchie directs a gangster picture. Sold. Hope it’s good, as it opens Friday. Or Thursday night.

The Valentine’s Day romance looks like “Valentine’s Day,” without the laughs and an all African American cast. Courtney B. Vance is one of the other big names in it.

Screenwriter (“Gladiator”) turned director William Nicholson wrote and directed this end of a marriage melodrama, due out Mar. 6

Nina has a pointed question for Mr. Bremond, the realtor offering to help her neighbor, Madeleine, sell her home in Moselle, on the French/Luxembourg border.

“Mr. Bremond,” she fumes (in French, with English subtitles), “Do you have a problem with old ‘dykes,’ ‘lezzies,’ LESBIANS?”

No. Of course not. You can’t be judgemental in real-estate! Not in France!

So why, Nina wants to know, turning to Madeleine, can’t you tell your FAMILY about us?

“Two of Us” is a romantic tragedy about a loving couple, together for decades and having lived across the hall from other for years and years. They’re retired, now, and making plans to travel and to simplify life by making themselves a one-apartment couple.

Only Madeleine (Martine Chevalier) can’t make herself “come out” to her adult children. And Nina (Barbara Sukow), slightly younger and German, is exasperated by this.

The consequences of that fear, hesitance and indecision will batter them both over the course of this simple, emotionally harrowing debut drama from director and co-writer Filippo Meneghetti.

Madeleine — “Mado” to Nina — wants to tell her divorced daughter Anne (Léa Drucker) and son Frederic (Jérôme Varanfrain) at a little birthday gathering for her. We can see it in her eyes, hear it in her “I have something I want to say.”

But even though she desperately needs to get this out in the open, even though she has promised Nina time and again that she will, she cannot.

Neither child has a clue, but her testy son has accused her of cheating on their late father, and moments after she backs out of speaking up, he lets another “You couldn’t wait for dad to croak” crack.

For Nina, it’s not the cowering that hurts. It’s finding out from the realtor that Mado backed out of the sale. She plainly lost her nerve. Nina is furious.

She’s still fuming when she stumbles into the smoky apartment where Mado has left food burning. She’s been rushed to the hospital. She’s had a stroke. She cannot speak. Her eyes have the vacant stare of the insensate.

And Nina, dashing to her side, has no legal or social standing. Daughter Anne is puzzled. The health care system is quite firm. Nina is shut out, growing more desperate to elbow her way back into Mado’s life and care for the woman she loves.

Meneghetti, who co-scripted this with Malysone Bovorasmy, takes just enough time to let us see what love looks like. Madeleine and Nina share their days on walks, their nights dancing barefoot to “their song,” an Italian cover of the pop standard, “I Will Follow You.”

Then, this is dashed. But maybe not. If only Nina can get to her, get past her family and then the caregiver they send her home with, look into Mado’s eyes and jar her memory.

The ordeal is told strictly from Nina’s point of view, with Mado (Chevallier is a veteran of French film and the Commedia dell Arte) giving us the barest hint that the character can come back from this. Nina is sure she could “save” her and their love, if only…

Sukowa (“Gloria Bell,” TV’s “Twelve Monkeys”) plays up Nina’s desperation as the script makes her cunning enough to seek ways to make this work out for them, no matter what the family might think.

Drucker, seen in Fox TV’s “War of the Worlds,” is the picture of subtlety as Anne makes the journey from woman without a clue to woman who starts to pick up on clues. She lets us see Anne do the math, lets us see Anne trying to hide her epiphany.

The film’s brevity means some ideas are under-developed. But what we’re left with is a sublime and sublimely simple portrait of a love that’s been lived in and the devotion it will take to ensure that endures.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, adult themes

Cast:Barbara Sukowa, Martine Chevallier, Léa Drucker, Jérôme Varanfrain

Credits: Directed by Filippo Meneghetti, script by Malysone Bovorasmy, Filippo Meneghetti A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:35