Movie Nation

A 1954 romance by Françoise Sagan is what inspired actress and sometime producer Durga Chew-Bose to become a first time writer-director.

Otto Preminger made a film out of “Hello Sadness” (the title’s translation) in the ’50s, with Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr and David Niven.

Here, it’s McInerny (“Palm Trees and Power Lines”) and Claes Bang (“The Square,” “The Northman,””The Burnt Orange Heresy”) as the father and daughter and Dad’s latest lover (Nailia Harzoune) whose vacation is disrupted by the arrival of the challenging friend of the late wife and “godmother” (Chloë Sevigny) to the somewhat innocent teen. Greenwich Entertainment has this slated for May 2 release.

Screen veteran Embeth Davidtz (just seen in “Retribution,” in “Old” and a regular on “Ray Donovan”) moves behind the camera for this adaptation of an Alexandra Fuller novel. The South African Davidtz would seem to be an apt choice in remembering the racist, minority governments that ruled Southern Africa in a repressive colonialist manner in the allegedly post-colonial 1960s and ’70s.

Zikhona Bali plays an African servant, Levi Venter the white landowner’s curious child — “Are we African?” “Are we racist?” — and Davidtz takes on the part of the armed, obstinate mother hellbent on hanging onto land her ancesters “acquired” by nefarious means.

This premiered at Teluride, and if Sony Pictures Classics has a release date, I’m not seeing one. Straight to streaming?

A mother and daughter grow their own to make ends meet, then a cop moves in downstairs.

It’s 2008, and paranoia was totally justified in “Grassland.”

They’re playing up the fact that Oscar winner Common produced this. Rachel Ticotin, Mia Maestro, Jeff Kober and Quincy Isaiah are in the cast of this William Bermudez and
Sam Friedman film, which streams via VOD on April 18.

The departure of a beloved giant panda, sent home from Koreo to China to propogate this endangered species, becomes a most touching farewell as we mourn her leaving with the two zookeepers who cared for her in “My Dearest Fu Bao.”

Pandas are among nature’s most adorable creatures, and this documentary by Shim Hyeong-jun and Thomas Ko encourages the viewer to overdose on cute. But it’s also about loss, solitude, intimate grief and very public group grieving and the connection humans feel with animals, which those animals often acknowledge.

Fu Bao was born in Korea, and as she reaches four years of age, she’s to go home to her natural breeding place, where the bamboo is sweeter and the gene pool is larger, ensuring the survival of this rarest of bears.

Her leaving hit the staff of the Everland Zoo — which is all but built around housing and letting the public see pandas — hard. They still have Fu Bao’s parents, and her two adorable baby sisters, as a draw. But the years of care, attention and interaction with Fu Bao makes this loss lead to grieving, especially to her chief caregivers, Kang Cheol-won and Song Young-kwan.

The two men have tended gardens raising food for the zoo, improved her playground, cleaned her night time enclosure, and catered to Fu Bao’s every need. Learning that she was leaving, Kang even arranged for a heavy duty hammock to be sewn and he himself installs it in a tree in her compound. She and her mother played and napped in one when she was a toddler, he explains.

Both men acknowledge openly-expressed male grief and even male hugging aren’t the social norm in Korea. But this departure hits Kang so hard he weeps and it makes Song recall an earlier on-the-job loss that he only just got over, thanks to the lovable Fu Bao, who let him “love again.”

Surrounded by a park emblazoned with slogans playing up the countdown to Fu Bao’s departure the two — Kang especially — struggle to cope, and to comfort the mobs that pour in to see her before she leaves. People endure 400 minute wait times, and wait outside the panda enclosure for Kang or Song to reassure them and comfort them, a sort of “Elvis has left the building” gesture that plays as incredibly sweet.

The two men have tended gardens raising food for the zoo, and catered to Fu Bao’s every need. Learning that she was leaving, Kang even arranged for a heavy duty hammock to sewn and he himself installs it in a tree in her playground compound. She and her mother played and napped in one when she was a toddler, her explains.

Both men acknowledge publicly expressed male grief and even male hugging aren’t the social norm in Korea. But this departure hits Kang so hard he openly weeps and it makes Song recall an earlier on-the-job loss that he only just got over, thanks to the lovable Fu Bao, who let him “love again” (in Korean with English subtitles).

Surrounded by a park emblazoned with slogans playing up the countdown to Fu Bao’s departure —
“You’ll always be our baby panda!” — the two, Kang especially, struggle to cope, and to comfort the mobs that pour in to see her before she leaves. People endure 400 minute wait times, and wait outside the panda enclosure for Kang or Song to reassure them and comfort them, a sort of “Elvis has left the building” gesture that plays as incredibly sweet.

One is tempted to ask what psychologists and sociologists might have to say about this public grief and human connections with affectionate and adorable animals. But when the departure comes and goes, and Kang travels to visit Fu Bao in her Chinese home some while later, we have our answers. And you’d have to be made of stone to not be moved.

Rating: unrated, G-worthy

Cast: Kang Cheol-won, Song Young-kwan and Fu Bao.

Credits: Directed by Shim Hyeong-jun and Thomas Ko. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:36

A lone combat vet squares off against bloody-minded veterans-turned-contractors on a bridge in Boston in “Aftermath,” a sometimes satisfying action pic undone by lapses in logic, talk-you-to-death villains and murky, uneasy politics.

Dylan Sprouse, who got his big breaks as Adam Sandler’s kid in “Big Daddy” and on TV’s “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” plays an ex-Army Ranger whose drive to the movies with his kid sister (Megan Stott of “Little Fires Everywhere” and “Yes Day”) is interrupted by a terrorist attack.

The assault on Boston’s Tobin Bridge is carried out with military precision and uncertain aims. A gang of commandos given “Kilo, Foxtrot, Tango, Sierra, Yankee, Echo” code-names by their leader, “Romeo” (nepo baby Mason Gooding of “Scream”) block traffic and blow two spans of the bridge out.

Their goal? Get to a convict (Dichen Lochman of “Severance”) being transported to a trial.

With a number of people already killed and some 70 or so ziptied to their car steering wheels as hostages, the ex-military/now-“contractors” terrorists have demands, and a live stream platform on which to broadcast them to the world.

Only Eric and his “particular skills” stands in their way. Well, there’s always an older truck-driving vet (Will Lyman) who can be relied on in a pinch. Everybody else is just cowardly “collateral damage.”

And then there’s Eric’s PTSD flashbacks to something that happened in Afghanistan that have to be dealt with.

The set-up is “Die Hard” meets “The Rock,” a plot that’s bloody-minded with military men and women who have gone fascist driving the action.

Eric will pick off the masked murderers, one by one. He’ll drop the occasional one-liner about how he’s acquired a bad guy’s semi-automatic weapon.

“I didn’t get this by playing rock, paper scissors!”

Gooding chews up the scenery as a Man with a Mission, the pill-and-eye-popping commander they used to call “Captain Chaos” starting “the greatest revolution since 1776,” spitting with rage, hectoring the cops and only really challenged by his combat-vet quarry and the convict who remembers him, who betrayed him, the woman they nicknamed “Doc” Brown (Lochman).

Cute.

The picture wanders off the straight and narrow when it pauses to pontificate. The combat situation problem solving is interesting enough, even when far more logical moves make themselves known.

But whatever the effects and convincing (faked) Tobin Bridge setting, the object of the Nathan Graham Davis screenplay is to keep the hero and the villain alive and maybe a wild card character and a sidekick around for a big finale. Director Patrick Lussier — “Drive Angry” was his high-water mark — never forgets that, and more’s the pity.

Rating: unrated, very violent

Cast: Dylan Sprouse, Mason Gooding, Dichen Lochman and Megan Stott.

Credits: Directed by Patrick Lussier, scripted by Nathan Graham Davis. A Voltage release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:37

Sept. 25, crank it up to eleven. Again.

Dying and “immuno compromised,” Molly (five time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams) is a woman on a “sex quest.” It’ll take a special sassy bestie to help that pay off.

Oscar winner Sissy Spacek, Jay Duplass and Rob Delaney are also in the cast.

Hulu has this series set to roll out, in toto, April 4.

A Canadian-set thriller with a forest disappearance, a genus of weird woodland…entities possibly responisible, a curious young woman (Chloe Pirrie) in search of answers that could get her in over her head.

“Beast or spirit? Don’t think anyone quite knows what this thing is.”

If you can’t sell a horror movie with that tagline, you’re not trying.

May 9.