Movie Nation

Alexander Nevsky was a great hero of medieval Russia. The 13th century Grand Prince of Kiev and fought the Germans and Swedes, paid off the Mongols and was made a Russian Orthodox saint and the focus of a famous Sergei Eisenstein Soviet era bio-pic, with music by Sergei Prokofiev.

Putin-era Russia even named a nuclear submarine after him.

Alexander Nevsky is also the stage name –legally changed — of body builder turned actor/director Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Kuritsyn, a Schwarzenegger-sized star in Russia, who makes his Hollywood debut with “Black Rose.” And the nicest thing one can say about that is let’s hope he didn’t pawn his barbells.

“Black Rose” is a lurid C-movie thriller about the murders of Russian prostitutes in Hollywood, crimes that police Captain Frank Dalano (Robert Davi) can only solve by bringing in a crack Russian cop for assistance.

Major Vladimir Kasatov (Nevsky) is tough, brave, a maverick who busts in on a Moscow bank robbery/hostage situation and ends it with a Jeep and a gun.  He’s also huge.

“What do they FEED you over there?”

Paired up with a police profiler, Emily Smith (Kristanna Loken), Kasatov must pry info out of a secretive community of ex-pats who don’t expect Putin-esque police tactics here in America. Silly them.

Failing that, he and Smith must lure the murderer into the open.

“Our plan is working,” Smith deadpans as she hears of another killing. Right. A few more murders and they’ll have their guy, for sure.

We, of course, have guessed the killer much earlier than them. But Nevsky the director has to flesh out an 82 minute thriller somehow, so we get shots of the big Russian walking Venice Beach, strong-arming Russian bakers and busting up a mugging with murderous, trigger-happy relish.

Night club scene? Naturally. Cryptic Russian notes pinned to the victims, along with a “Black Rose”? Why not?

There is zero urgency to the performances, across the board. Even the victims, some of them tortured, seem to be unmoved by their own suffering, waiting for “CUT” so they can check their phone to see if another offer has come in. ‘

Nevsky the director shows no hint of style or flash, and Nevsky the actor may smile once or twice, but as in the earlier version of this, Arnold’s more amusing and meaty (barely) “Red Heat,” any use of facial muscles is forbidden when that’s the only way you know to play “stoic.”

There’s no chemistry between the leads, and nothing they do or say propels the action forward.

Veteran tough guy Davi gives fair value in his few scenes.

But the rest of this plays like an ill-considered vanity project intended for export to Mother Russia. Maybe there, they’ll be willing to ignore the stiff acting, dull directing and story whose ending is guessable almost from the opening credits.

Cast: Alexander Nevsky, Kristanna Loken, Robert Davi, Adrian PaulMPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence

Credits: Directed by Alexander Nevsky, script by Brent Huff, George Saunders . An ITN release.

Running time: 1:22

“The Blair Witch Project” wasn’t the first “found footage” horror picture, though it has proven to be the most imitated.

The latest is “Phoenix Forgotten,” a thriller about — now get this, three young people who set out, with a camcorder and gear, to solve a seemingly unnatural mystery. Then, it was this mythical witch that haunted a dead town long ago and the hunt was in the woods of Maryland, this time it’s “The Phoenix Lights,” a dazzling and under-explained light show that appeared in the skies over Phoenix in March of 1997, with answers sought in the plateaus and desert mountains of Arizona.

Sophie (Florence Hartigan) is in town in something like the present day, helping mom move. But she uses the trip as an excuse to seek answers, and lost videotapes that might connect her long-lost brother with the “Blair Witchy” name, Josh (Luke Spencer Roberts) with those infamous “lights.”

On the found tapes, Josh, the smart aspiring journalist he crushes on, Ashley (girl-next-door approachable Chelsea Lopez) and his pal Mark (Justin Matthews) set out for answers in the desert and later, among the Apache, taking Mark’s “Grand Jeep Cherokee” on the quest.

Forget for a moment that no redblooded teenage American boy would miss-ID his first set of wheels, and we’re quickly made aware of what works with this Ridley Scott produced no-budget sci-fi spin on “Blair Witch,” and what doesn’t.

The framing device, the modern inquest into what happened to Sophie’s brother 20 years ago, is dull, limply-acted and filmed. The resolution of the mystery is laughably derivative and lame.

But the grainy, clumsy old tapes of that original search captures an almost Spielbergian/J.J. Abrams level teen reality that is delightful. Josh’s behind-the-camera questions and encouragement of Ashley is awkward and needy. And as Ashley, Lopez corrects clumsy journalistic practices (asking “close-ended” yes-or-no questions) and gets across a focused curiosity that hints at a future that might have been.

Watch Ashley Foster, the character, impersonate Jodie Foster, heroine/actress, in a scene from a movie (“Contact”) that was new when “The Phoenix Lights” lured the “Phoenix Forgotten” off the map.

Director Barber makes the period video look exactly like misplaced family home movies — rolling picture, static, shaky, the works.

But there’s not nearly enough here to justify the heavyweights among the producer credits, making “Phoenix Forgotten” a bit too apt in its title — an abandoned movie doomed to be forgotten in, oh, about a week’s time.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for terror, peril and some language

Cast: Florence Hartigan, Luke Spencer Roberts, Chelsea Lopez

Credits:Directed by Justin Barber, script by and Justin Barber and T.S. Nowlin. A Cinelou release.

Running time: 1:27

The audience rejection of “Free Fire,” the gonzo guns-and gunplay action comedy from the director of “High Rise,” may represent some tipping point moment for Americans’ attitudes about gun violence and its cavalier treatment on the big screen.

Probably not. Maybe people have stayed away because the cast, which includes Oscar winner Brie Larson, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” hero Armie Hammer and “District Nine” South African Sharlto Copley, doesn’t have one box office name in it.

But when you’re looking at a dozen or so IRA gun buyers and assorted gun dealers, trapped in a shootout in an abandoned, concrete-walled factory in 1970s Boston, the message in the mayhem is more pointed than perhaps the film’s potential fans realize.

A hail of bullets reduces us all to an earlier place in our evolution — crawling, bleeding and wounded, struggling to survive but counting the minutes until we bleed out. And no amount of ammo or firepower changes that.

The set-up — IRA types (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley) employ local talent and a couple of go-betweens (Hammer and Larson) to make a buy of American semi-automatic weapons. The sellers are led by Vernon (Copley), and include Babou Ceesay (“Eye in the Sky”) and Noah Taylor (“Rush”).

Everybody’s glib and flippantly insulting, especially the dapper, preppy Ord (Hammer).

“You smell good,” a hoodlum hurls his way. “Thank you. It’s your MOTHER.”

One zinger, after the shooting gets started, stings.

“Bet you thought you were too handsome to get shot!”

Because yeah, you stick a bunch of armed, paranoid, drug-addled or just gun-nut-dumb crooks into an enclosed space with a lot of ricochet-prone surfaces, any little thing can set it off. And in this case, it’s a big thing and it’s a big coincidence.

Larson, whose acting in this is entirely too casual for somebody who should be afraid for her life and aware of the carnage assorted pistols and assault rifles can carve out, may just “want everyone to go home happy with this deal.” But no one does.

Murphy’s IRA gun buyer isn’t so into the deal that he can’t flirt with the one “bird” in their midst. Copley’s gun seller is entirely too testy and confrontational for this to go easily.

And then there are the hotheads, druggies and aggrieved subordinates to worry about.

Co-writer/director Ben Wheatley stages the shootout as if everybody has an endless supply of ammo in their purse or leisure suit jacket. The whizz and zing of bullets on the soundtrack will keep you doing what the principals do — ducking, hugging the floor or concrete pillar or sand bag — whatever shelter they can find — in between hailstorms of bullets.

Hammer has the most fun with the gunplay, Murphy gets the most grunt out of his wounds and Larson looks as out of place here as she did in that King Kong movie. Seriously, dear, you collect a check you commit to the part.

It’s a simpler than simple movie, with characters lurching between life and death, listening to John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” and cracking wise during a shoot-out staged in real time. An anachronism? Characters who keep saying “It’s ALL good.” That’s a recent construction — Tiger Woods beat it to death — unused in the far out ’70s.

But the zingers are mostly flat, the bloodshed a hilarious collection of movie-prolonging shoulder, arm and leg wounds and the whole a generally unpleasant Who Dies Next? about characters we never, for one second, care about.

The guns become the stars — snub nosed revolvers, AR 70 and Garrand rifles. Not that most of these guys can hit what they’re shooting at. Funny how that works when you’re shooting while being shot at. It’s not as easy as most movies make it seem.

Still, “Free Fire” falls short as a moral lesson or satiric statement, shorter still as a “Shoot’em Up” style ballet of bullets.  For this Tarantino-take-off to have been as cool as the trailers hinted, they’d have needed more gold chains, more drugs, more open-collared shirts and more Gun Nut in Chief Ted Nugent music.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, pervasive language, sexual references and drug use

Cast: Brie Larson, Armie Hammer, Cillian Murphy, Sharlto Copley, Noah Taylor

Credits:Directed by Ben Wheatley, script by Amy Jump (screenplay), Ben Wheatley . An A-24 release.

Running time: 1:30

Perhaps the finest accomplishment of those who made “Their Finest” was in getting their World War II “Dunkirk” movie out before the bigger-budgeted, all-star cast “Dunkirk” recreation due out this summer.

Because their film, a war-on-the-home-front tale of a plucky would-be screenwriter working on a propaganda film, learning the movie business, the reality of “based on a true story” and finding a woman’s place can be outside the home, is utterly sublime, in its own way.

Based on a Lissa Evans novel, “Finest” is sentimental and sad, silly and vain as only film actors can be. It’s predictably familiar, but it manages to be an old fashioned movie about making an old fashioned movie that works.

Gemma Arterton is Catrin Cole, a Welsh woman whose secretarial duties at an ad agency broadened to include quip-writing for comic strips, what with the war taking every able-bodied British lad out of civilian work and into the army, Royal Navy or RAF.

That gets her noticed by a Ministry of Information screenwriter, Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), who needs somebody of her gender to “write the slop…girl talk, women’s dialogue” in propaganda films.

Catrin needs the job as she keeps the home fires burning and supports herself and her man, an unemployed artist (Jack Huston) with a Spanish Civil War wound that keeps him out of the fighting.  She must endure Tom’s flirtation, pretentious actors (Billy Nighy) and the caprices of the various ministries that want to bolster morale with films that reek of “authenticity and honesty,” even if audiences hoot at their ridiculous idealization of life in a munitions factory or the like.

A Hungarian emigre producer, Mr. Baker (Henry Goodman), plainly inspired by the ex-pat producer Alexander Korda, wants to make “the film that will win the war,” a commercial project with real actors and a UK and US release, and that sucks up Tom, Catrin & Co. in a frantic search for the right story told in a way that bucks up British resolve and inspires American sympathy.

Director Lone Scherfig (“An Education”) and screenwriter Gaby Chiappe tap into the novel’s focus on the era’s revolutionary changes for women. Catrin “can’t be paid as much as a chap” and is not destined for any credit.

“The war has SKIMMED off the CREAM and we’re left with the RANCID curds,” complains the faded matinee idol played by Bill Nighy, a dapper dandy not above seizing his last good chance at fame.

Women, the elderly and the less competent but ineligible for service have opportunity thrown at them. Catrin also has to make the most of it.

The film, in quick strokes and simple, resonant and familiar visuals, takes us into “The Blitz,” the German air war against civilian London, into the shelters in The Tube, where everybody kept a “stiff upper lip” by making their own entertainment, waiting for the bombers to pass so that they could “keep calm and carry on.” A nice touch — a trumpet player’s forlorn rendition of “Keep the Home Fires Burning” echoes through the underground crowd of Londoners awaiting the “All Clear.”

Scherfig similarly paints a vivid picture of a small nation wholly mobilized for war, with everybody having new tasks, pitching in. Catrin is just one among millions.

The “elite” bureaucracy is ably represented by Richard E. Grant, as the head of the propaganda film division, and Jeremy Irons as a higher-up given to quoting Shakespeare’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech from “Henry V,” which became one of Britain’s most iconic morale boosting feature films of the war.

There are touches from “The 49th Parallel” and “Shadow of a Doubt,” for those who know what to look for in referencing “real” propaganda features made during the war. Their movie within the movie, as cheesy and primitive (toy boats, model airplanes) as you’d expect from the era, is to be about the Miracle at Dunkirk, when British civilians piloting all manner of ships and small boats rescued their army from fallen France, a disaster played up as a victory that saved Western Civilization. 

Arterton, Nighy, Grant and Irons are splendid, and Jake Lacy of “How to be Single” is hilarious as an American born Norwegian pilot with the RAF ordered into the movie to provide “a REAL hero,” albeit one who cannot act a lick.

Eddie Marsan is a Jewish-German emigre actor’s agent, and Helen McCrory impresses as the agent’s flinty sister. Rachael Stirling makes a sympathetic go of a lesbian government informant assigned to the film to keep those tricky writers on message.

Less impressive are the film’s too-predictable situations, which offer few surprises outside of Catrin’s dogged insistence on making the girls who were the real life heroines of the Dunkirk story she chose to tell the heroines of the movie. Claflin, late of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “Mockingjay” sequels, and Huston (“Outlander,” “Ben Hur”) have the weakest characters to play, and make no impression at all.

But “Their Finest” is still a lovely, nostalgic look not just at a war the Brits just can’t stop memorializing, but at the way movies were made way back when, with a little magic and a dollop of sentiment could carry a story for audiences starved for anything that offered them the possibility of a happy ending.

MPAA Rating: R for some language and a scene of sexuality

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Bill Nighy, Eddie Marsan, Richard E. Grant,  Jeremy Irons

Credits: Directed by Lone Scherfig, script by Gaby Chiappe, based on the Lissa Evans  novel. An STX/Europa release.

Running time: 1:57

Bertrand Russell “Bert” Berns was a composer who wrote pop hits and soul classics, from “Hang on Sloopy” and “I Want Candy” to “Here Comes the Night,” “Cry Baby” and “Piece of My Heart.”

As a producer, he had a hand in making Van Morrison, Cissy Houston, Solomon Burke and Neil Diamond stars.

But despite having an off-Broadway stage musical revue built around his songs, despite the occasional box set collection of his work and a recent biography, he’s little known outside of pop music cognoscenti like, say, Springsteen guitarist/singer “Little” Steven Van Sant, who narrates a new documentary about Berns’ life and work.

“BANG! The Bert Berns Story” takes its title from Berns’ 1960s record label, where Morrison broke out as a solo artist, where Diamond established himself not just as a songwriter, but as a SINGER/songwriter. The film, built around Joel Selvin’s biography of Berns, takes us from Berns’ Bronx childhood, where rheumatic fever scarred his heart and kept him indoors, learning to play piano and guitar, through his star-crossed adulthood, sneaking into the recording business, dominating it, and then dying too young to really enjoy the fruits of his years of frantic creation.

Berns was a Jewish boy who caught the Cuban music bug in the ’50s, went to Cuba, came back and found a way to infuse those rhythms into American pop. He wrote the novelty charmer, “A Little Bit of Soap,” hit the charts again with the co-written “Twist and Shout,” and then scored with the girl group classic “Tell Him.”

Paul McCartney testifies to the glories of “Twist and Shout,” which The Beatles turned into a smash — after the Isley Brothers had already scored with it. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones laughs in awe at the bluesy Bronx Jew whose songs were favorites for the Stones to cover early in their career.

Cissy Houston, Brenda Reid and Van Morrison remember Berns’ nurturing ways in the studio.

But “BANG!” isn’t shy about looking at the dark side. Berns was in a business with brutally sharp elbows, and he learned quickly to give as good as he got. The great Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler comes off as a greedy, unethical bully in accounts of Berns’ years with that premiere jazz and soul label. And that shaped Berns’ approach to the business as well.

Never a wise guy, Berns wasn’t shy about partnering with wise guys and chumming around with “made men,” which made business dealings with him…interesting. Ask Neil Diamond about that, because the movie (co-directed by Berns’ son Brett) doesn’t dare. Diamond does not appear on camera and the mob threats are mostly just implied.

Berns married a go go dancer, Ilene, who had a hand in his business and is no shrink-away-from-a-fight type herself.

Still, it all comes back around to the songs, many with “Bert’s trademark,” Van Sant narrates, this “edge of despair” feeling that came out of him. When he wrote “Piece of My Heart,” he was talking about his own damaged heart, but Erma Franklin and then Janis Joplin rendered it into a harrowing classic, full of urgency and romantic desperation.

Yeah, he cooked up “I Want Candy” and “Hang on Sloopy” and “Twist and Shout” was basically “La Bamba” with new lyrics (not mentioned in the movie). But Berns’ best work was as “the white soul brother” who made sure his artists sang his songs “the way HE meant it,” with all the passion and hunger of a man who knew he wouldn’t live long, but meant to make his mark while he did.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity
Cast: Paul McCartney, Cissy Houston, Brenda Reid, Ilene Berns, Ben E. King, Solomon Burke, Van Morrison, Keith Richard
Credits: Directed by Brett Berns and Bob Sarles,  written by Joel Selvin. An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:35

It’s one of the most thankless, unsung jobs at any newspaper, and one of the hardest.

Obituary writers make value judgments, about whose life and achievements or simple notoriety is worthy of “500, 800 words,” and whose isn’t. And they spend a frantic few hours, trying to reach grieving loved ones and peers, sifting through legions of “facts” often provided by people’s faulty memories or the family circle exaggerations of the deceased.

Because God forbid they get something wrong. This is, as one obit writer in the fine new documentary “Obit” puts it writing someone’s history “at the very moment they become history.”

Filmmaker Vanessa Gould naturally chooses The New York Times as the setting for her film, focusing on one of the last newspapers with a staffed obituary department, veteran writers who specialize in collecting information about the recently-deceased, from popes and tyrants to pop stars, inventors, adventurers and crooks.

Blending documentary footage of some of the subjects — a Transatlantic rower, a stripper-girlfriend of Lee Harvey Oswald shooter Jack Ruby, a political aide who made sure Kennedy looked better than Nixon for those historic 1960 TV debates — with interviews of those who wrote them, Gould creates a fascinating portrait of the work and the patient, harried and detail-oriented folks who do it.

There’s a formula for an obituary, we learn. Typically, there’s just a single sentence that mentions death. Some are “news” obituaries, others more colorful feature story obits, with anecdotes and laughs, even, in their lines.

Bruce Weber comes off as a man who loves to talk. He sits on the phone, collecting first the hard fact details that the obituary will be built upon. We only hear his half of the conversation as he asks survivors “Was he married, and how many times before you? Could you spell that for me?”

A proper newspaper obituary, not the fluff provided by a family to a funeral home for publication, is filled with facts. People embellish their war records, their athletic achievements, their “firsts.” Nailing down what is true, on deadline, when the person who best knows that truth is dead, is tricky business.

Weber will make a mistake, and most newspaper reporters will spot it the moment he makes that assumption during a phone interview. But that’s what “Corrections” are for.

The staff — editor William McDonald and others — talks in the jargon of the “press,” whether a notable deserves an “above the fold” (front page, top half) remembrance, or a “refer,” an obituary mentioned on the front cover but printed inside.

The lonely keeper of “The Morgue,” the newspaper’s vaunted archive of stories, clip files and photographs, tracks down images from the distant past and previously-reported stories on the subject of this or that obituary.

Writers recall the harrowing rush to get something into print after sudden deaths — Michael Jackson, Prince, Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman. And each relishes the grace notes of a particularly distinct life rendered in just the right keystrokes, when they have time to make an obituary “sing.”

Margalit Fox, once an aspiring cellist, loves alliteration and has a touch of the poet about her. When detailing the life of one of the last typewriter repairmen in North America, Manson Whitlock, she turns “the ffft of the roller, the ding of the bell, the decisive zhoop … bang of the carriage return, the companionable clack of the keys” into the music of the man’s life.

It’s not the most cinematic of subjects. And the film, like most recent documentaries about newspapers, has a New York myopia about it.

But the anecdotes, about tidbits, old family photos, that perfectly summed up that person’s story, or the blunders (you’ve GOT to confirm somebody is actually dead) make “Obit” in itself a fine piece of “instant history” for a profession that is itself going dying out.

And when newspapers, and these reporter/writers are gone, who will be there to sum up a life — notable or notorious — in 800 words or less?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with mild profanity

Cast: Bruce Weber, Margalit Fox, William McDonald, Paul Vitello

Credits:Directed by Vanessa Gould. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:35

“Unforgettable” lets the hated Katherine Heigl stop pretending she was ever going to be “America’s Sweetheart” and wear her resting bitch face with pride.

As a filthy-rich ex-wife hellbent on getting her husband and family back, she has the regal posture of the riding classes, born in designer clothes and perfect makeup. She combs her perfect hair, then combs her daughter’s  so obsessively that you just know she’s an upper crust psychopath.

“Now you’re perfect, just like Mommy!”

And we buy it. Boy do we buy it.

The movie may be nothing more than your standard love triangle, with its scheme-by-scheme, crime-by-crime set up for a third act cat fight, but Heigl and Rosario Dawson are well-matched foes, women willing to throw down and draw blood over the man they both love.

The guy? Well, generic chiseled hunk Geoff Stults (TV’s “Odd Couple”) doesn’t suggest “unforgettable” or “irresistible,” but that’s always where this sort of thriller loses points.

Dawson is Julia, an online story editor for a magazine, leaving that life behind for her new man. We’re told that she was a domestic abuse victim, and that her abuser’s been in jail and he’s about to get out.

She’s motivated to slip out of town and “start over.”

David (Stults) is a wealthy, successful something-or-other who’s starting a micro-brewery (little late for that) living just inland from those “Big Little Lies” richies. Julia fits right into his showplace house, with his darling shared-custody daughter.

Yeah, it’s like she’s living the ex-wife’s life. So when they meet, she offers reassurances.

“I get it,” she says.

“No, you couldn’t possibly.”

And any assurances that Tessa, the ex will “calm down” are, we know, a joke. She can’t calm down. She’s wrapped too tightly for that.

Things start to go wrong for Julia —  phone misplaced, a ring lost, a future step-daughter escaping into a carnival crowd.

And everywhere she turns in this enclave of wealth, they run into Tessa.

Undermined, isolated, suspected and accused, she is alarmed. She turns testy at Tessa. And it’s on.

“I hope I’m not interrupting.”

“Then why are you HERE?”

But there’s no mystery to this thriller, and little suspense. The entire story is framed in flashback, after a crime. We know who’s survived.

The cameras stalks Julia, but the editing isn’t above delivered the occasional cheap fright — a dark night, a shadow slipping by a window. But the script and producer-now-a-director Denise Di Novi (“The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and TV’s “Beaches”) want to explain everything, spoon-feed it to us, to wholly give away motives and back story. When you meet Tessa’s mom (Cheryl Ladd), you understand all.

You give away the mystery, you make the movie lean too hard on its implausibilities. Well, we DO tend to keep WAY too much personal data on our cell-phones. Get into somebody’s phone, you get into their head.

There’s soap opera-styled over-sharing, and the picture is peopled with stock characters; the funny best-friend-from-work (comic actress Whitney Cummings) whom Julia confides in, the mother-whose-behavior-explains-her-daughter’s.

But Dawson makes us believe how overmatched Julia feels, and Heigl’s “Mommy Dearest meets Fatal Attraction” turn is real mustache-twirling villainy. What will she do to get back what was hers? What WON’T she do?

If this hits, and it could, we could see a whole new chapter in Heigl’s struggling, diva-damaged big screen career. No more frothy, ill-conceived romances, just scary Joan Crawford/Barbara Stanwyck/Bette Davis/Theresa Russell minxes, black widows and back-stabbers. She’s already the movie star America loves to hate? Why not get paid for it?

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, violence, some language, and brief partial nudity

Cast: Katherine Heigl, Rosario Dawson, Geoff Stults, Cheryl Ladd

Credits:Directed by Denise Di Novi, script by Christina Hodson, David Leslie Johnson . A  Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:40

With all the money Louisiana has poured into film incentives over the past decade and a half, it’s a little shocking that so little cinema has come out of the bayou that gives us a real flavor of the place.

Most glaringly, there’s no comic equivalent of say, a “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” A poor state that is giving away several fortunes to movie makers hasn’t managed to produce a comedy that feels, sounds and tastes like New Orleans. There’s an audience for that, a crying need for it.

And for the first ten minutes or so, “NOLA Circus,” an indie Afro-centric “barbershop” comedy set around Algiers Point, makes you think, “This could BE that movie.”

Then the “circus” part kicks in, a mad collage of racists, drug dealers, stereotypes and dull writing, and the movie’s wit evaporates like a cold drink on a hot day.

There are two competing barbershops, one run by our politically-active, Rosa Parks-worshiping, Afro-rocking narrator, Will (Martin Bats Bradford of “Free State of Jones”). Marvin’s, across the street, is run by the disreputable Marvin the Scissors (Vas Blackwood) and his two physically distinct brothers, Happy the Big Ears and Con the Anaconda.

Will quotes Martin Luther King Jr., thinks of his hair as a political statement and is popular because of it. Even singer Eryka Badu is a fan.

Marvin? He collects snatches of hair, and not from “up there.” Good thing his drug-dealing girlfriend (Kamille McCuin) isn’t wise to that — yet.

But Will is playing with fire, too, and not just with the politics. (The film’s opening scene has a trio of high-voiced Klansmen raiding his shop and threatening him.) Will is sneaking around with the vivacious Nola (Jessica Morali). And the only way he avoids a brutal beating from her over-protective, white-haired psychotic brother Denzel (Reginal Varice) is to put him off the scent.

Telling Denzel he thinks Nola is sleeping around with a pizza delivery guy gets every Italian-surnamed pie-maker in the parish a beating. Giuseppe (Ricky Wayne) isn’t standing for that. In a racist tirade for his fellow Italians, he screams for the blood of Denzel. And that can mean only one thing. Call the family’s “made man.”

“Get Enzo!”

Writer-director Luc Annest throws potent street drugs, random comic nudity, two women dressing as Playboy bunnies robbing/kidnapping the city’s richest and whitest and dueling stammerers at us.

Yeah, he’s seen every Spike Lee movie ever made, starting with Spike’s debut, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads.” The thing is, Annest didn’t discover what made the funniest ones work.

Bradford makes a likable scoundrel, but Annest abandons his most interesting character for long interludes — often violent — involving drug deals, peripheral character comic melodramatics and the like. Will is the cause of all this mayhem, and while his comeuppance is coming, we’re treated to some pretty nasty Italian stereotypes and some generally unfunny African American ones.

Annest fills the screen with printed explanations of this street drug or that haircut or, um, “yoga.” He delivers a wedding, an opera audition and a Kevin Smith-worthy exploration of the relative lengths of tongues and penises.

Some moments might make you smirk. But there’s little that makes you laugh. Denzel’s unwarranted beatdowns are too severe, Nola herself is a short-skirted blank slate and Will is seriously under-developed as a character in the process.

“Barbershop” comedies are ensemble pieces, so this could have worked, in spite of all that. But the one-liners, the situations and the buffoonish caricature-characters just aren’t there, comedically. As for “flavor,” Annest whiffs on that quite thoroughly. Showing a New Orleans street band, with natural sound, in one scene in which he dubs in generic soul music betrays a lack of effort to land a public domain jazz tune, or sloppy inattention to detail.

And there’s one big thing any aspiring filmmaker should figure out in studying movies set within the African American community, aimed primarily at that audience. Every such film with a pun in the title (NOLA is both a character, and an abbreviation for New Orleans, Louisiana), from “Jason’s Lyric” to “Just Wright,” just sucks.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with gun violence, beatings, nudity, profanity, drug humor

Cast: Martin Bats Bradford, Jessica Morali, Vas Blackwood, Kamille, McCuin, Ricky Wayne, Lucius Baston, Dave Davis

Credits: Written and directed by Luc Annest. An XLRator release.

Running time: 1:29

When you think of the wonders of nature, chances are China isn’t the first place that probably pops to mind.

Its vast population and 75 years of Communist oppression, censorship and recent years of resource-devouring expansionism and regional muscle-flexing can make us forget that the cutest critters on Earth, pandas, call it their home.

So “Born in China,” this year’s Earth Day offering from Disney’s documentary division, DisneyNature, is something of an eye opener. Those 1.4 billion people — including including the seven million of occupied Tibet — live mostly in cities. That leaves vast mountain wildernesses, high, sparsely-populated plateaus whose pristine rivers feature breathtaking waterfalls, deserts and bamboo forests for wildlife.

The film, narrated by John Krasinski, sets out to tell us about red-crowned cranes, Tibetan antelope (not named “Tibetan” here, but “chiru”), golden monkeys, snow leopards and pandas. But since birds and antelope aren’t particularly cuddly, Lu Chuan’s film settles in on a panda mom and her cub, a snow leopard and her two cubs, and a tweenage monkey trying to find his place in “the family.”

Dawa, the snow leopard, lives on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the “highest in the world,” we’re reminded. What we’re not told is the “Tibet” part of the name. It’s an arid, wild place where mountain goats and the calves of domesticated yaks are the snow leopard’s prey. Not marmots, Krasinski jokes. Too funny looking. Bigger game.

“In Dawa’s world, you must take life to give life,” Krasinski narrates. Disney never tires of reminding us of “The Circle of Life.”

The film makes the point that leopards and pandas being solitary animals, the mothers dote on their children, just for the company. The snow leopard frolics are cute, the panda footage as adorable as you might expect.

Mei Mei, the baby panda, tumbles down hills, tries and fails (a lot) to climb trees as her mom coddles, tugs at and plays with her in the full knowledge that she’s growing up and moving away someday soon, leaving mom alone again, nibbling her “40 pounds of bamboo a day, 40 POUNDS” in solitude.

The golden monkeys live in extended families that viewers of any nature doc about primates will recognize — a patriarch, lots of females collaborating (comically) to raise the young, adolescent males banished to live in a pack all their own. Disney calls those males “The Lost Boys,” (of course) which is where Tau Tau, the monkey, spends his time.

There are predators — wolves, goshawks. And there is death, mostly off-camera. This is Disney, after all. Let the BBC have nature snuff films all to itself.

It’s a lovely, informative movie that flirts with cloying, but never quite gets there. It was also made with Chinese money and participation, and Disney desires to curry favor in the People’s Republic. That can be felt in every effort to erase “Tibet” from human memory.

Krasinski’s light voice works best in actorly interjections — “Whoa!” and the like. But he often sounds like he’s reading, and when he’s reading he might as well be selling car insurance on TV.

G-rated and very short, “Born in China” is padded with a long, funny and revealing behind-the-scenes closing credits.

All in all, it’s an eye-opening offering from DisneyNature, even with the Chinese pandering, Chinese spin and image-burnishing we can sense was part of the package.

MPAA Rating: G
Cast: The voice of John Krasinski
Credits: Directed by Lu Chuan, written by David Fowler, Brian Leith. A DisneyNature release.
Running time:  1:12

Eight films into the “Fast and Furious” franchise, this much is clear. These movies, especially the latest, “The Fate of the Furious,” are not to every taste.

For all the action beats, the over-the-top digitally-augmented car chases, the trash-talk one-liners and the warm fuzzies over “You never turn your back on family,” they’re stupid. The new one? Colossally stupid.

But if you’re in the mood for a cartoon car thriller that defies the laws of logic, smart dialogue, honest plotting and physics, well friend, have we got the movie for you.

“Fate” adds Oscar winners to the cast, Havana and Siberia (OK, Iceland) to the locations and nothing at all to the formula of cars, capers, supervillains, one-liners and “hug it out” “family” conflict.

Still, give director F. Gary Gray credit. He edits Vin Diesel into a passable performance, knows how to film a fight and “fix” a car chase in a computer — or knows how to hire people who do — and tipped the makeup crew so that everybody, from Charlize Theron and Dwayne Johnson to Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Kurt Russell and a certain regal cameo has never looked prettier.

Dom Toretto (Diesel) is on his Havana honeymoon, racing for vintage Cuban pink slips when the cyber-crook known as Cipher (Theron) whispers menacing nothings in his ear. Next thing you know, he’s “gone rogue,” and his old team, led by Detective Hobbs (Johnson) and augmented by an ex-con they thought they’d put away (Jason Statham) are commissioned by Mr. Nobody (Russell) to bring him in.

A weapon’s been stolen which could lead to an “instant stone age,” in terms of digital civilization. The surveillance hack called “God’s Eye” tracks everyone and everything who might try to get that Electro-Magnetic Pulse generator back. And Dom is on the clock, stealing stuff that the whispering, leggy villainess Cipher needs to complete her dastardly plan.

The plot takes us into prison, where Hobbs and the Brit brawler Deckard (Statham) swap tasty trash talk in adjacent glass-walled cells. Hobbs, in his prison-orange jumpsuit, doesn’t agree that this is “a good color on you.”

“It’ll look better with your BLOOD on it!”

Later, it’s “That tight t-shirt is cutting off blood to your brain.”

The script panders to the lead characters shamelessly, giving fans big Diesel and Rodriguez smiles, Tyrese Gibson and Ludacris barbed banter filled with disrespect and Johnson a hilarious bit where he’s taught his daughter’s soccer team a pre-game Maori war chant.

But most of the action is this or that character knuckling a gear-shifter and grimacing “I GOT this,” dialogue filled with “That’s not GOOD” and “Guys, we’ve got snow mobiles on our right!” The plot ranges from wildly implausible to simply not possible.

But there is one alarming sequence that gives a new twist to “product placement.” Self-driveable cars are hack/hijacked for a heist that you’d figure car companies would PAY to be left out of. Not Jeep, Fiat, VW, Toyota or Dodge, though.

There are disposable characters, and not just the villain’s minions. But one of the dumber elements of these movies is how so few of the actual leads, friend or foe, from previous pictures seem to stay dead. Only Paul Walker has truly exited the franchise. Maybe Djimon Hounsou doesn’t need the money to make a soap opera return.

That also happens in cartoons. In this Charger, Challenger, Bentley, Lamborghini, Corvette and Mercedes world, it’s not just the coyote who comes back to life after a beat down. The Road Runner gets its time in the body shop, too.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for prolonged sequences of violence and destruction, suggestive content, and language

Cast: Vin Diesel, Charlize Theron, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Kurt Russell
Credits: Directed by F. Gary Gray, written by Ch.  A Universal release.
Running time: 2:12