Movie Nation

Obsessive teen love — is there any other kind?

It can get out of hand in a heartbeat. Especially when the crush is on a “Hearthrob.” Especially when the guy with the crush on the hearthtrob is focused, M.I.T. bound, inexperienced and obsessive by nature.

Writer-director Chris Siverston (“I Know Who Killed Me”) tries his hand at another thriller set among the young and the restless with this dreamy, moody tale of “Endless Love” leading to violence.

And even though it’s got a novel setting (Tacoma) and some sharp observations to make about personalities, set for life in your teens, learning that every choice has consequences and escaping the judgments of your past and “reputation,” it fails on the most simplest levels.

It’s a low-energy thriller that doesn’t build suspense, leaves little that’s “mysterious” and fails to make us fear for the heroine by giving her most of the clues we the viewer have been shown, and having her remain oblivious to what the film posits as her existential threat.

That class valedictorian she’s summer slumming with? It’s the smart, quiet ones you have to watch out for.

Aubrey Peebles of “Sharknado” and TV’s “Nashville” stars as Sam, our narrator, fresh out of high school and pretty much out of boys to tempt among her peers. She has “a reputation.”

That’s the only thing about her that smart kid Henry, played by Keir Gilchrist with more hostility than lonely valedictorian nerdiness, knows. “SLUT” is what he writes in his journal the day he runs into her on the beach where she’s just been shunned at a memorial service for a classmate who used to be her best friend.

Him? She knows just as much about him as everybody else in class, at least in her party until we hook-up crowd — “Valedictorian Henry.” When he brushes her off by suggesting guys like him are “Dark Matter” in the universe of their school — unseen, ignored — she gets her back up. She’s not having his “wise sage schooling the class bimbo” nonsense.

Henry is smitten. And “smitten” in a thriller is code-language for “obsessed.”

He observes, makes mental notes, reasons out a stragetgy. Her car won’t start after her shift at the diner, Henry’s there to give her a life home. He apologizes for judging her and underestimating her. That’s flattering.

“I think I’d like to ask for your number.”

The innocence of their “FIRST DATE” (a inter-title) is only faintly chilled by Gilchrist’s button-his-shirt-to-the-top creeper-style performance of the part. He’s like a scary Justin Long.

Sure, she’s lovely, with the Kardashian vocal fry of the unread, the bored and too-cool-to-care (Peebles has something of a Margot Kidder as Lois Lane quality). All the boys are drawn to her and a lot of them suggest they have “history.”

But she’s like any other problem this aspiring bio-engineer (his mom’s choice of major) approaches — solvable.

Sam doesn’t know Henry ensured her car wouldn’t start. She doesn’t see him snooping into her phone. She certainly doesn’t know he’s hacked it — more “research” into what she’s like and what she likes and who Henry’s competition might be.

Siverston populates the picture with reliable high school “types” — the mean girl twins (Rebecca and Caroline Huey), the hunky teacher that the girls lust for (Peter Facinelli of the “Twilight Saga”), the persistent ex-beau party boy Dustin (Jimmy Bennett) and that guy’s boorish, jockish pal (Tristan Decker).

“My man, give her the hiccups, yet?”

Siverston undercuts the “I’m dating a sweet, considerate guy — for a change” charm far too early, gives away the game even as Sam’s mom (Ione Skye of “Say Anything…” way way back when) is swooning over this young gentleman with great potential who is doing wonders for a daughter whose self-esteem issues have her on a community college, service sector track, if teen pregnancy doesn’t get in the way.

Henry sticks up for Sam to his smarty-pants friends and won’t let her dis her community college choice “like it’s some consolation prize…it’s a college. You get out of it what you put into it.”

He’s whispering sciency sweet nothings in her ear and saying all the right things even as we, if not she, notice him noticing where her family hides its spare house keys.

We, if not she, recognize in an instant that Henry sees Dustin as a threat.

And we, as should she, know where this is all headed. But not really. Siverston escalates things into the realm of the ludicrous, even if he never has his cast pitch their performances to match the growing paranoia/hysteria and violence that follows.

Gilchrist (“It’s Kind of a Funny Story,””It Follows”) leaves no doubt. Peebles plays it as if Sam has no clue, despite being deep and smart enough to be way ahead of us in this regard.

The acting, like the tepid thriller it is parked in, is so mild mannered it lowers the stakes when it should be raising them.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, teen drinking and smoking

Cast: Aubrey Peebles, Keir Gilchrist, Peter Facinelli, Ione Skye

Credits:Written and directed by Chris Siverston. A Marvista release.

Running time: 1:26

Forget Elvis. Give no more thought to accusing Eminem.

“White Boy Rick” might be the ultimate cultural appropriator.

He adopted street argot — abandoning verbs almost entirely — embraced black slang and took on an African American-influenced wardrobe long before Marshall Mathers learned to rhyme.

White Boy Rick trafficked in illegal firearms and moved into crack cocaine when it proved to be the more lucrative business in a dead end neighborhood in a fast-decaying Detroit, where hope died in the ’80s.

A baby daddy at 16, with a junkie for a sister, he was an ethnic outlier, an early adapter of the most negative associations of a culture that wasn’t his but a class — poor and desperate — that was.

Warned that there was a difference between the attention black teens and men earn from the police, Rick was the white boy the Feds and local cops swarmed over. And further warned that there’s a BIG difference between “White Time” and “Black Time” when it comes to prison sentences, he wound up serving “Black Time.”

If his story seems familiar, we’ve seen it on big screens and small ones for decades, a cultural cliche, the most pervasive inner city African American stereotype there is. The white boy lived it.

The film based on this true story, directed by Yann Demange (”71″) is by turns swaggering and sentimental, cocksure and callow, the many moods of Rick himself, played with as word-slurring, naive bravado by screen newcomer Richie Merritt.

Even at 14 in 1984, Rick can spot a “fake” AK-47 (Egyptian made) at a gun show, and use that information to score himself really good deal on it. Rick Wershe Sr. (Matthew McConaughey, in a nuanced turn) taught him well.

But to what end? His wife left him, and she “left YOU too,” he reminds his kids. Rick’s already hustling, a stranger at school. Daughter Dawn (Bel Powley of “A Royal Night Out” and “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” stunningly transformed here) is a junkie, sleeping with any guy who can get her what she craves.

They might live right across the street from Grandma (Piper Laurie) and Grandpa (Bruce Dern). But the whole neighborhood around them’s gone to ruin. Gun dealing Dad is the only one to realize they’re not just surrounded by “lowlifes,” they’re “lowlifes” themselves.

He talks big and butch and dreams of getting into the Next Big Thing (a video store). Rick Jr.? He’s hanging with his friends, all of whom are black, with best friend Boo (RJ Cyler of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) a member of the Curry crime family.

To Rick, it’s the most natural thing in the world to roll into Curry HQ and hustle big boss Lil’Man (a smart and mercurial Jonathan Majors) some of those Egyptian AK-47s, “upselling” them silencers that gunsmith Dad machines in their basement.

But the kid quickly finds himself under the FBI microscope, strong-armed by agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rory Cochrane) into cozying up to the Currys, dealing drugs with them, attending Lil’Man’s mayor’s mansion wedding to the most gorgeous woman at the Skate and Roll rink, Cathy (Taylour Paige).

Yeah, the Feds are after the Currys, corrupt cops (“This Detroit, boy. If you ain’t on the take, you get took!”) and crooks high up in the administration of Mayor Coleman Young. They’re so desperate they’re willing to use a 14 year-old boy as an informant.

Not that Rick’s a snitch. He’s just doing what they say, and as he does, he gets deeper and deeper into the mob’s business (Eddie Marsan plays another Miami-based drug supplier, just as he did in “Miami Vice”) and social life (a weekend in Vegas to attend the ’85 Hearns/Hagler title fight.).

The son of a corners-cutting gun dealer hasn’t learned much about morality, and Rick is quick to pull a pistol and even fire it in anger, requiring an FBI bailout. His first taste of Curry violence rattles him. But he can’t see anything but the dire straits they’re in now and how “everything just gets worse.”

Merritt is great at conveying the insensate impulsiveness of youth. Of course he doesn’t wear a condom. Of course he’s “brave.” He doesn’t consider consequences, and only slowly awakens to the murderous mayhem his death-dealer Dad is putting on the street, and the utter amorality of his own decision to get into selling drugs.

McConaughey’s Rick Sr. is living a long, dark night of the soul — a drug-addicted daughter who flees him, cops who muscle his kid, mobsters willing to kill any and all of them if they get out of line and the grim realization that when he chose his lowlife line of work, he made the world more violent and worse for everybody in it. Rick Sr.’s darkest moment is realizing he’s not moral enough to rise above gun selling, not “hard” or brave or connected or smart enough to extract Jr. or anybody else from their predicament.

“White Boy Rick” starts out as playful as its title, teeters into sentiment as Rick takes on responsibilities with both his “families,” both of which he betrays, and drops into jaunty here and there as he absent-mindedly bargains with cops and killers and hits the street corner to make his and his family’s fortune.

“I’m lookin’ for a gun. Grandma keeps hidin’ mine!”

The script scores points about the racial injustice of drug laws of the era and plunges into moralizing in a third act that might turn maudlin, if we’d allowed ourselves to care that much about anybody in this sordid circle of sin and vice, “desperate” or not.

It’s not “Blow” or “American Gangster” or “American Made” even, not on that level of sobering (if sometimes comical) morality tale. But “White Boy Rick” still makes for a blunt reminder of just how low we all sank during the “Just say no” ’80s, when the only people punished for not saying “No” were co-enabled into saying “Yes,” and faced “Black Time” for doing it.

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

Cast: Richie Merritt, Matthew McConaughey, Taylour Paige, Bel Powley, Jennifer Jason Leigh, RJ Cyler, Rory Cochrane, Piper Laurie, Bruce Dern, Eddie Marsan

Credits:Directed by Yann Demange , script by Andy Weiss, Logan Miller, Noah Miller. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:50

Garry Winogrand was a street photographer, somebody who found art in the real life he was documenting on the streets of New York, someone not unlike the more famous Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Levitt and his more infamous New York predecessor “Weegie.”

He shot tens of thousands of rolls, exposed over a million frames of film, and upon his death, left hundreds of thousands more undeveloped, unprinted and not-quite-forgotten.

He was “the original digital photographer,” “burning film” at an astounding rate, as if testing the thesis about how many monkeys it might take to type out “Hamlet.”

He made his bones as a commercial photographer, grabbing magazine images of celebrities and strippers, politicians and Americana.

And then one day, an influential art photographer and fan, John Szarkowski, landed the job of curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, and pronounced Wino grand “the central photographer of his generation,” and parked him in the middle of an important exhibition also featuring Diane Arbus and Richard Friedlander. Winogrand became a star, a published artist, a teacher and lecturer.

The new documentary “Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable” offers a decent if superficial portrait of the man and a vast sampling of the work that identifies him, undeniably, as an artist. But it’s also an unintentional and somewhat backhanded essay on the caprices of modern art, how one gets to be famous in the insular world of New York galleries and the taste-making museums of the Big Apple.

Because Winogand, “a poet with a camera,” “a choreographer,” a man whose still photographs — mostly black and white — “moved” in the frame and documented the “Mad Men” era in New York like few others, was also selected for fame.

A pugnacious, motor-mouthed Bronx-accented “big city hick,” as one of those describing him says in the movie, often compared to the writer Norman Mailer, Winogand was a photojournalist who re-directed his eye in a more personal direction. And as the “artist” label welded itself to him, he got good at pontificating, oversimplifying what he did in the false modesty of the talented and acclaimed.

“All a photograph ever does is describe light on surface,” he’d say, in interviews and public Q & As and lectures. “It’s not lightning striking. It’s part of a process.”

Scores upon score of his shots illustrate “All Things are Photographable,” shots with immaculate compositions, striking images of people at airports, people with bandaged faces, tragedies observed obliquely, interracial couples at a time when that was rare, “liberated” (bra-less) women at a time when that was commonplace.

When he captured, developed and printed images of blurry people in the foreground, heads lopped off, “tragedy” photos that tell half a story without facts and details, he was “redefining composition.”

He figured out that labeling himself a Robert Frank and Walker Evans fan, even if his shots don’t really resemble theirs, was a way to be marked as in their class.

When he produced a book with an occasional leering quality about it entitled “Women are Beautiful,” he was widely criticized and reviled. But now, decades after his death, he can be appreciated for preserving, for all time, the look of his age — pre-Photoshop, before widespread cosmetic surgery, personal trainers and advances in dermatology, makeup and skin and hair care products.

His friends, biographers, curators and one ex-wife appear in “All Things,” mixed in with his images, archival news footage of the streets of the day (he shot in LA, Las Vegas and Texas, too) and snippets of public talks, TV interviews and on-the-street audio (Radio?) interviews. And the portrait that emerges is that of a lonely obsessive who compulsively took pictures “to see how something would look in a photograph” — hundreds of thousands of images. Millions.

If the work more often reveals him to be a great craftsman while those who champion him use phrases like “a philosopher about what photography is,” that’s just the price of that “artist” label and the place it was applied.

His obsessions, always finding people looking off frame, flicking his Leica up and snapping frame after frame when he’d see odd “chorus lines” of people, someone with a large bandage on his or her face, are fascinating.

But his fame is anchored in the fortuitously capturing the reaction the wheelchair-bound beggar earns on the faces of  young female passersby in Los Angeles, perfectly-framing a solitary sailor walking through snow along Battery Park in the evening, noticing the woman passed-out (hopefully) in a gutter front of a Denny’s as traffic whirls by her.

It takes little away from Winogrand to note that do that, he had to shoot more film than anybody else, even if in his later years, he never bothered to develop it — just like the utterly unheralded (during her lifetime)  photographer/nanny Vivian Maier.

Winogrand’s best stands with anyone’s. But as Sasha Waters Freyer’s just-revealing-enough film makes clear in its third act, when Arthur Quiller-Couch’s crack about editing, having the good sense and eye to “murder your darlings” is applied to him, Winogrand was for all of his career a photographer, for some of that career an artist and for too much of it “half a photographer” — not making art, not making prints. Just snapping and snapping away.

MPAA Rating:unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Garry Winogrand,  Geoff Dyer, Jeffrey Fraenkel, Susan Kismaric

Credits:Directed by Sasha Waters Freyer. A Greenwich Entertainment/PBS “American Masters” release.

Running time: 1:30

The news here isn’t that the shamed James Franco, who had so much work in the can before revelations about his predations on young to under-age women became public, has another movie coming out.

Or that he made a Western, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” for Netflix.

It’s that the Coen Brothers cast him, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Stephen Root and many others signed up for the Nov. Netflix release.

Six episodes about a man named Buster Scruggs is what the movie’s about.

And it’s almost reflexive, these days, to dig deep into the credits. There’s only one young woman listed in the cast, and one can only hope she avoided his attention during filming. At 35, she’s probably aged out of his pool of victims.

Scott Eastwood’s career guidance appears to be “Try everything my Dad did,” and that’s why we’re getting dramas, romances and now an actual comedy from the chip off the old block.

But is there a “movie star” today who’s more bland?

He’s not managed any of those “big breaks” particularly well. But before we sentence him to TV, or pack him off to Spain to shoot “spaghetti Westerns” with the Italians, let’s dump 250 more words criticizing Hollywood nepotism, and how rarely it works out.’

“Walk of Fame” is a desultory comedy which surrounds Eastwood with ostensibly funnier people, a farce about how “everybody butt EVERYbody” in LA may do one thing for a living, but their dream — which they are actively working on — is to be a star.

Eastwood plays Drew, whose law degree is useless as he has already flunked the bar twice. He can’t manage to be on time to his job in the omnibus call center where he takes orders for “butt busters” or deals with customer complaints for a whoever is outsourcing that work.

“Thank you for calling Vantage Light Bulbs. How can I brighten up your day?”

A walk with his work-friend Nate ( Cory Hardrict) leads to their witnesses an attack by a “serial humper,” a caped/masked villain who molests women on the street.

The guys fail to offer assistance, but Drew decides to follow the sizzling stewardess of the slow-mo hair flipping persuasion Nikki (Laura Ashley Samuels), because she’s out of work (nude photos all over the Internet) and headed to Star Maker Studios, a cut-rate acting school run by a wannabe/never-was played by Malcolm McDowell.

“I’m the only person in this town who can take you RIGHT to the top, baby,” he insists.

“Watch out, NASA. It’s time to discover some NEW stars!” he adds.

“I was offered the lead in ‘Amadeus.’ All right, it was the TOUR. But I turned it down because I care THAT MUCH about my students!”

McDowell has the only funny lines in this thing, and even those are in limited supply.

“By the time I’m through with you, you’ll have seen more red carpet than the streets have seen urine!”

The classes of “no talent idiots” are trained by the likes of Alejandro (Chris Kattan), and are a motley assortment of delusional Italian mug, irritable dwarf, never-too-late little old lady, young pretty stroke victim, nebbish and fashion nerd.

They are to be polished and prepped for “their Big Showcase.”

Eastwood has zero difficulty play-acting scenes in which he’s incapable of expressing any emotion or eliciting any reaction from his audience.  Few of the comic veterans around him manage anything either.

There are seemingly-fake cops riding around “helping” people by harassing them from their motorcycle with a sidecar.Drew has a hippy/surfer/stoner roommate, played (wanly) by writer-director Jesse Thomas. Jamie Kennedy has a scene as a very effeminate airline steward/colleague of Nikki’s.

The only promising pairing here is putting Eastwood with Hardrict, a young black man who rides a Segway, not a car (they double up on it once), leery about waiting for the cops to show at that “serial humper” incident.

“Black people do NOT fare well at crime scenes.”

No matter what he orders in restaurants, fried chicken is what he gets.

“Free at last, my ass.”

Build a romantic comedy around these two, with Eastwood pursuing whoever and Hardrict setting him straight about women or racism in America, and you’d have something much more conventional, and more more potentially funny.

But Thomas & Co. knew what they were getting with Eastwood, that he’s just not funny. Not in the least. No comic heavy-lifting for him. 

He’s working steadily, in bad action films (“Suicide Squad,” “Pacific Rim: Uprising”), the odd romantic weeper (“The Last Ride”) and a lot of supporting roles.

But he’s not making any impact at all as an actor. How long before the magic surname stops getting his calls returned?

He’s blandly handsome, sure. But at this point you have to wonder if TV, Spain or even co-starring with an orangutan could save him.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA

Cast: Scott Eastwood, Laura Ashley Samuels, Malcolm McDowell, Cory Hardrict, Sonia Rockwell, Chris Kattan, Jamie Kennedy

Credits: Written and directed by Jesse Thomas. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:27

Got to love it when a bad comedy sums itself up and all but saves you the trouble of writing an entire review.

As in, “Guys, is this supposed to be funny, or not?”

That’s what Debbie (Alex Meneses) blurts out to best buds Harris (Russell Peters) and Reeves (Faizon Love) in “Ripped,” a comedy about two potheads who hit some “Area 51…CIA weed” in 1986, and wake up thirty years later.

Debbie used to date Harris, until her father chased the two blitzed boys away for being irresponsible bong brothers with an eye on ruining his baby girl.

Now, thirty years later, she’s a divorced single mom in her ’40s. And her first beau and his bro? Morbidly obese middle-aged teenagers.

“Ripped” is the sort of comedy that can ill afford to waddle through an interminable 16 minute prologue with two even less funny actors playing even more blitzed versions of Love and Peters as teens.

The guys wake up, morbidly obese (munchies will getya) in the Chevy van they got stuck in the woods with 30 years earlier, looking at the world as “the worst hallucination ever.” Reeves is now rocking a gut butt, Harris is trending plump, and the world? It’s left them behind.

Plug-in cars, cell phones, self-flushing toilets, “Goggle” and people talking to them from “Planet Skype?” How’s a mellow bro supposed to take this all in? Weed is LEGAL.

“Welcome to Home De-Pot. How can I medicate you?

Harris tries to re-start things with an indulgent Debbie, but she has a kid, whom they meet in spite of her best efforts. Sophomoric reactions is all they’re capable of.

“Debbie’s been f—–g. Here’s the receipt!  Brad (Bridger Zadina)!”

No college, no cash, never had any ambition, they cook up the one idea guys who stay blasted and peckish can manage — a restaurant that serves chili, just chili — but chili spiced with marijuana. It creates its own cravings for that second serving, right?

One of the rare laughs in the movie is the one loan officer who agrees to back them, because “You guys have really good credit, too. Nothing pops up!”

Peters and Love are two guys who fall into that “Whatever happened to?” corner of the comedy universe. Nobody rocks the gut-butt like Love (“Couples Retreat,””Zookeeper”), but here he’s a little too convincing at trying to act in a movie stoned. Was he?

Peters reaches for charming, showing off DJing and roller-blading skills like a guy who never grew up.

But there’s nothing for these guys to play that doesn’t involve a pipe and a lighter, and there’s something inherently sad in middle aged stoners that isn’t a downer when the stoner is AARP age, for instance.

Even the lads’ bank pitch, a “history” of pot and its famous users (George W., Franklin, Bill Clinton, Obama, etc.) feels played, though its assault on the “gateway drug” ad campaign recently hurled into theaters in states where legalizing pot is on the ballot, is almost almost cute.

“It IS a gateway…to PANCAKES, Cinnabons” and of course, chili.

MPAA Rating: TV: MA, drug use, scatological humor, profanity

Cast: Faizon Love, Russell Peters, Alex Meneses, Farah White, Stephanie Drapeau

Credits:Directed by Brad Epstein, script by  Billiam Coronel, Brad Epstein. A Screen Media/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28

Spy recruiters tell us that there are four prime reasons why people betray their country, summed up by the too-cute acronym “MICE — Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego.”

And a couple of those can certainly be applied to the Egyptian turncoat Ashraf Marwan, the one his Israeli Mossad handlers code-named “The Angel.”  The son-in-law of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was studying in London, never quite good enough for the president-for-life’s daughter, his opinions not respected at dinners where Egyptian leadership was present. His “ego” was bruised.

And studying in London, he developed a taste for alcohol and the other pleasures of casinos. More “money” would be nice.

Perhaps he was a tad rash, calling the Israeli Embassy there, offering information. “Coercion” could certainly be used to turn him.

But in some spies’ minds there can be another motive for treason, one implied, repeatedly, in the new biography, “The Spy Called Orphan,” about Donald Maclean of infamous “Cambridge Five,” who sold or gave away secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II and on into the Cold War. Some traitors figure they’re preserving the peace in giving away secrets, maintaining balance in a tense diplomatic relationship, preventing deadly blunders based on false assumptions.

That’s the way Ashraf Marwan is painted in “The Angel,” a fascinating if somewhat muted spy thriller from the director of “The Iceman” and “Criminal,” Ariel Vroman.

What starts as a tale of another Israeli espionage coup finds something closer to an uneasy middle ground as this cagey, well-placed operator, played with a perpetual poker-face by Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari, tries to “save Israel” with one gesture, save Egypt’s face with another and save lives as he walks the tightrope between the two in those tense years between The Six Day War and The Yom Kippur War.

Marwan’s father-in-law (Waleed Zuaiter plays Nasser) is sure he needs watching after Marwan suggests, in a state dinner, that preparing for another war to regain lands lost to Israel after the debacle of the 1967 “Six Day War,” when Arab states all around Israel invaded, and saw their forces annihilated, is maybe not the best way to achieve Egypt’s aims.

Nasser puts a highly-placed thug (Slimane Dazi) on the Marwan case. And his studies in London? Those might curtailed. But not before Marwan has attended a class that discussed the work of “Garbo,” a Spanish Nazi agent (Juan Pujol García) who moved to Britain to help fool the Nazis about when and where D-Day would occur.

Marwan is of a mind to stop another bloodbath by tipping the Israelis about Egyptian plans. Merely removing the element of surprise could do that.

He has just enough time to change his mind when the Israelis put an agent (Toby Kebbell) on him, blackmailing the headstrong young man who called their embassy and brazenly made his pitch over the phone. Nasser dies, Marwan schemes to cozy up to the more reasonable and thus mistrusted by most in the government new president, Anwar Sadat (Sasson Gabai).

Marwan isn’t trained in spycraft, and the Israelis, while cagey and enthusiastic, don’t exactly have his best interests at heart. They’re thrilled to have this inside source, willing to pay him handsomely, but don’t fret over the fact that he must keep his actions and movements secret even from his wife (Maisa Abd Elhadi).

Marwan has to be a quick study with steady nerves as he passes what he knows on, tries to convince the Israelis of his “bonafides,” and at the same time protect Sadat from his enemies within Egypt and himself from exposure and summary execution.

Real life spy stories are always much closer, cinematically, to “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” than any “Bourne” or Bond film. One way “Angel” flirts with more melodramatic thrillers is the actual danger faced by Marwan, not just from his own government’s spy hunters, but from the increasingly irate Israelis, who are sure he’s “crying wolf” about plans for an attack.

Another Bond touch is Marwan’s enlistment of help from “a friend,” a Swinging London sexual adventurer played by Hannah Ware. She is temptation incarnate, and handily amoral when it comes to Marwan’s need for assistance with whatever clandestine thing he has going on.

Vroman never raises the suspense level in all of this to any great height, never shows Marwan having any real crisis of conscience. The spy comes off as a gambler with few “tells.”

Gabai gives Sadat, a future Nobel Peace Prize winner, as cagey enough to suggest he doesn’t know what’s going on even as we wonder if he does.

Kebbell and the actors playing his Mossad bosses are the only ones who let on how frantic they are, recognizing the stakes are much higher for Israel, fundamentally mistrusting any Arab who purports to be “helping.”

Netflix has cooked up a good-looking production, period perfect in its costumes, London and Cairo settings peppered with period-perfect Triumphs, MGBs and Citroens. But the occasional anachronism sneaks into the dialogue, and only an utterly inept music supervisor would park both K.C. and the Sunshine Band and “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” in the mix years before they hit the pop charts.

“The Angel” falls thus more on the “sturdy,”  tradecraft-oriented spy thriller end of the scale than “Neftlix’s answer to Jason Bourne.” It’s still a fascinating piece of history built around the possible higher moral calling of a traitor whose motives for his actions can be looked at as much bigger than simple M.I.C.E.

MPAA Rating:

Cast: Marwan Kenzari, Toby Kebbell, Hannah Ware, Sasson Gabai, Waleed Zuaiter

Credits:Directed by Ariel Vroman, script by David Arata, Uri Bar-Joseph. A Netflix release.

Running time:

“A Simple Favor” is a thriller that ticks likes a Timex, a precision exercise in button-pushing manipulation and a laugh out loud mystery that mocks its own manipulations, giggles at its own far-fetched twists.

Paul Feig of “Bridesmaids,” working from a  Jessica Sharzer (“American Horror Story”) script based on the Darcey Bell novel, gifts us with a goof on “Gone Girl, a calculating dark comedy that skips by on the ,most on-the-nose casting of the fall.

Blake Lively as the willowy, brassy and profanely sexy mom-gone-missing, and Anna Kendrick as the Mommy Vlogger/Mini Martha Stewart who is her brand new best friend — how perfect is that?

Stephanie (Kendrick) is the demure, over-eager, overdoes it Single Mom/SuperMom at their kids’ suburban Connecticut school. Emily is the rich, high powered PR director for a famous fashion designer in the city. They meet, and it’s love at first sight. Their little boys want a play date.

“Mommy already has a playdate…with a symphony of anti-depressants!”

Emily jokes about the kids drinking, drops F-bombs like she buys them wholesale, and from the tip of stilettos to the top of her perfectly-coifed blonde tresses, is everything Stephanie is not. “Love” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Within minutes, Emily is schooling Stephanie to stop apologizing reflexively, “a f—-d up female habit,” how to confront powerful men head-on, how to make the perfect London martini and she’s bucked up her non-existent libido with a bubbly, “Baby, you’re too sexy to give up!”

Within hours, they’re sharing, and then over-sharing — “secrets.” Stephanie’s are…interesting. Emily’s have to do with her once-promising writer-husband, played by Henry Golding with all the sexual sizzle he lacked in “Crazy Rich Asians.” Stephanie’s crack, that they have “more chemistry than a science fair” is right on the mark.

And within days Stephanie is being asked to pick up the kids, watch the kids, all leading up to the day Emily just vanishes. Stephanie must deal with two boys that have been dumped on her, a worried best-friend’s husband who leans on her, cops who wonder just what’s going on and a rising suspicion that Emily isn’t missing, she’s split, that she isn’t dead but just “gone.”

Kendrick carries off the cuteness with her usual pitch perfect timing and physically expressive acting. Stephanie is awkward, from her mask-the-fear smile to her Mom dancing to Emily’s vintage French pop, and guilty stumbling rummage through Emily’s closet.

There’s too much cuteness, of course. But the whole Mommy vlogger element makes a convenient plot device when Stephanie starts crowd sourcing the search for Emily. And if anybody can pull off a saintly-sweet but R-rated Nancy Drew, it’s Anna K.

“Every mom knows,” she says of her amateur sleuthing, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.”

Lively is so much more than a clothes horse in movies like this and “The Age of Adeline,” films where she’s “an enigma,” a woman with a secret. She is stunning, brazen, blunt and scary, and she turns Emily into an irresistible hormonal force — a man-eater/woman-teaser who turns every scene into “The Shallows” with her as the shark.

Feig’s touch is most pronounced on the picture’s periphery, the bitchy coterie of moms whose queen is the bitchiest of them all, a gay parent (Andrew Rannells), smart alec cops (Bashir Salahuddin), foul-mouthed kids and a fashion designer (Rupert Friend, never more hilarious) whose PR director may be missing, but that doesn’t mean he won’t insult every inch of your wardrobe in between your questions.

A favorite cut, the mean moms notice Stephanie’s methodical search, her helpfulness with Emily’s family and their queen snips, “It’s an arts and crafts project” to her.

The picture delivers one scene of shocking violence, and a third act full of twists that are pure hokum.

But Feig plays his audience — especially the female two thirds of it who will laugh, reel and grab hold of the empowerment (good and evil) messages — like a Wurlizter, the kind that used to accompany silent film melodramas where the vamps were just as obvious, the heroines just as pure (seeming) and the twists just as laughable and simple as “A Simple Favor.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content and language throughout, some graphic nude images, drug use and violence

Cast: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Henry Golding

Credits:Directed by Paul Feig , script by Jessica Sharzer, based on the Darcey Bell novel. Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:57

Picture By: Duncan Bryceland – Picture shows John Lydon performing with Public Image Ltd (PIL) on the third night of their seven date reunion tour at the O2 Academy, Glasgow, Scotland, UK 18th December 2009. Singer John Lydon was formerly known as Johnny Rotton and was the frontman for the notorious English Punk band the Sex Pistols who produced an array of infamous songs such as ‘God Save The Queen’, ‘Anarchy In the UK’, ‘Holiday In The Sun’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’. The shows mark the 30th Anniversary of the release of PIL’s groundbreaking ‘Metal Box’ album and the gig showcased their whole career including their eponymous seminal single ‘Public Image’, ‘Flowers of Romance’, ‘(This is Not a) Love Song’ and ‘Rise’.

In his youth, John Lydon, who went by Johnny Rotten back then, was always good for an quote.

Point a TV camera at him, as more than one British TV provocateur was given to do, ask him to say something outrageous and he’d oblige. If he didn’t, his bandmate Sid Vicious would jump in and steal the attention.

“Johnny Rotten was a piece of work,” he says now, over 60 and chuckling. “I WORKED on Johnny Rotten.”

But in his reflective moments, even back in the “Anarchy in the U.K.” days, he’d talk about longevity — about not living the legend and dying young, about not being trapped by a legacy, mythology, record contracts or band obligations.

“There’s nothing glorious about dying. Anyone can do it,” he’d say. And as to staying power, “I’m one of the very few people in pop history who will just not go away.”

In the new documentary “The Public Image is Rotten,” there’s Lydon, leaning on the breakfast bar in his kitchen, tucking a coffee mug in the oven (NOT the microwave) to warm it up, joking, pontificating, saying nice things about most everybody he ever dealt with (not all), at least at first.

At 62 (he was 60 when “Image” was filmed), he’s still rocking something like a Mohawk, his English considerably more polished than in his punk days, barrel chested and if not bourgeois and self-satisfied, at least peaceful and mellow. For him.

Filmmaker Tabbert Fiiller focuses on Lydon’s career with Public Image Ltd., the band he formed when The Sex Pistols imploded in the late ’70s. Trapped in a management contract with credit-hog impresario Malcolm McLaren, practically broke despite fronting one of the most influential bands in pop music history, “Rotten” captures a band at inception and tracks it and Lydon through its many MANY incarnations, many musical identities and enduring albeit cult appeal.

From its name, taken from a Muriel Spark novel, to their debut namesake tune (shades  of “Bad Company”), through hits such as “This is Not a Love Song” and the melodic “Rise,” driving through so many changes to the band, the sound and the music industry around them, “The Public Image is Rotten” tracks so much turmoil, so many musical chairs packed into every year of its existence that time seems to stand still.

The Sex Pistols take up a tiny portion of the man’s life, and take a back seat in the movie as Lydon leads us from his meningitis coma and associated amnesia of childhood, through the burden of the Pistols (Lydon lost the use of “Johnny Rotten” as a moniker to McLaren when they broke up). It basically jumps into that subject with late Pistols appearances where he’d shout “This is NO fun” from the stage, and finish a show with “Ever get the feeling you’ve been CHEATED?”

But he got famous, he insisted then, “through being HONEST.” and now he just shrugs off “positions I had to assume and tolerate,” as part of his “image,” positions which he’d then “walk away from.”

In interviews in the early PiL years, he’d call Public Image Ltd “a corporation, not a band.” Granted, he was writing the songs and his bandmates served at his whim, so he was president, CEO and CFO. But most of those collaborators make appearances in “Image is Rotten.”

Guitarist Keith Levene, whom he hired from The Clash, drummer Jim Walker and original bassist Jah Wobble seem more than happy to talk about PiL,, Wobble finishing more than one story of this difficult show or that dust-up in a pub with “I kicked ‘im in the face.”

Lydon is similarly sentimental and generous of just about everybody he played with over the decades, up to a point. Remembering Wobble’s exit from the band (where nobody made any money), swiping a box of band cash and vacationing in the States,  Lydon says he “contributed, but he took more than he gave.”

Friends like music video pioneer and filmmaker Julien Temple (“Earth Girls are Easy”) vouch for Lydon’s “authenticity,” fans such as Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Moby and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers marvel at the range of music PiL rambled through over the decades (Flea was even offered the band’s bass player gig in the ’80s, and turned it down).

Legendary drummer Ginger Baker of Cream played on one record and laughs about that now, others tell of finding out the band was headed on tour (“We don’t do tours, just a gig, here and there.”) and realizing they’d not been invited.

There was the infamous New York City Ritz show where Lydon tried to do a performance art “concert” of pick-up musicians playing behind a movie screen, in silhouette, one of many occasions “the audience almost rioted.”

Lydon explains the origins of several songs, his reputation for brawling — “When push comes to shove, you shove back.” — and the various band-mates exits, some of which seem to break his heart, even now — “An immediate disaster, wasn’t it? But you just have to get on with it.”

He draws the line at getting “too personal,” so no talking with his wife and her daughter’s kids, whom they’ve been raising, nothing too deep even if “by being honest” is his self-declared secret to success.

Nobody really got rich doing this, but Lydon has always been hellbent on doing his own thing “rather than a pop band rented by a record label and told what to do.”

Second drummer Martin Atkins fondly recalls the many lean times, “All of us in John’s Chelsea apartment — us, and the police. NOT The Police, the BAND,” he cracks.”

Long after punk died, the punk icon carried on — getting kicked off Tom Snyder’s “Tomorrow” show, getting spat upon by unreconstructed Sex Pistols fans a decade after that group broke up.

And through it all, the icon endures — wild-haired, bug-eyed, his manic keening and yelping evolving into something quite musical in midlife.

The man? Surviving, keeping the faith and carrying on. And mellowing. Just not all that much.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: John Lydon, Michael Alago, Martin Atkins, Flea, Thurston Moore, Moby, Vivien Goldman

Credits:Directed by Tabbert Fiiller. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:43

Nothing to do with Nirvana, so let’s avoid any “Smells like” wisecracks.

This Max Minghella film is about an aspiring pop starlet (Elle), her mentor (Rebecca Hall) and a BIG CONTEST that can make or break her.

They’re premiering “Teen Spirit” at the Toronto Film Fest but it doesn’t open until Jan.