Anamaria Marinca has a knack for playing characters you’d want in your corner during a crisis. The Romanian actress, who starred in Cristian Mungiu’s harrowing abortion thriller “4 Months, 3 weeks and 2 Days,” is the eye of the storm in Goran Stolevski’s “Housekeeping for Beginners,” a riveting domestic drama that finds her similarly raging against the machine.

No one smokes a cigarette with such quietly harried intensity as Marinca, and there is no forgetting her glittering stare, both of which Stolevski utilizes to great effect. In his third feature in as many years —this one selected as the North Macedonian Oscar entry for best international film — the Macedonian Australian filmmaker plunges us into the swirling eddy of merry but harrowing chaos among an unusual family. The film is a showcase for the skill and screen presence of the criminally underrated Marinca, who stars as Dita, a lesbian social worker trying to hold together her tribe by sheer force of will, coaxing and cajoling the system in order to knit together her queer found family.

There’s a deeply humanist core to Stolevski’s work, which varies in genre and tone, but always captures the bittersweet beauty of life. He made his feature debut with “You Won’t Be Alone,” a life-affirming fairy tale in which Marinca co-starred as a grotesquely disfigured witch. His sophomore feature, “Of an Age” is a queer romance about two young men who connect in a Melbourne beach town.

We enter “Housekeeping for Beginners” with a burst of joyous song, as Ali (Samson Selim), Vanesa (Mia Mustafa) and Mia (Dzada Selim) dance and sing around a living room. Their carefree fun is quickly juxtaposed with a burst of rage, in a doctor’s office, as Suada (Alina Serban), with Dita by her side, explodes at a bored, negligent doctor. She’s furious at him for ignoring her and other patients who look like her — Roma. With these two scenes, Stolevski establishes the film’s message and tone, weaving together childlike play and mischief with the crushing reality of racial and sexual inequality.

Stolevski, who wrote, directed and edited the film, delivers the relevant story details in snippets of dialogue and visual asides snatched out of the river of familial hubbub that is captured with a roaming handheld cinematography by Naum Doksevski. Dita and Suada are partners, and Suada’s kids, Vanesa and Mia, live with them in Dita’s home. Their gay roommate, Toni (Vladimir Tintor) had Ali over for a hookup, but he’s so much fun he becomes one of the stray queer kids they collect, which also includes a trio of young lesbians (Sara Klimoska, Rozafa Celaj and Ajse Useini) who seek refuge in this “safe house.”

Suada has cancer, and knowing that her prognosis is terminal, she demands that Dita become the mother of her girls, in her final, fierce act to secure their future. She also requests that Dita give them Toni’s last name so that they might escape the discrimination she faced as a Roma woman. The girls need legal guardians, and that is how a stressed lesbian and grumpy gay man find themselves married. To each other.

Within its restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the play-acting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes. At a parent-teacher conference, condolences are delivered to Toni, but the camera rests on the bereaved Dita’s face, unable to openly grieve the loss of her longtime partner. Their courthouse wedding is also a study in ironic double-meaning, as Ali sits next to his lover Toni, but only as a witness. At their raucous, booze-soaked celebration at home later, Ali thanks Dita for the opportunity to sit in front of the marriage registrar with the man he loves.

There’s no preciousness or over-explication about the sociopolitical and economic issues that shape their reality and make up the fabric of their lives: how they move in the world, the risks they take, the dreams they have. It is a quotidian kind of oppression, rendered here as a series of irritating clerical hoops, though the consequences of not jumping through them could be deadly.

While the subject matter is sobering, there is a dry humor at play, coupled with real warmth. Dzada Selim steals the movie as the precocious Mia, and if Dita is the spine of the family, Ali is the heart, his ability to connect proving valuable when Vanesa’s teenage rebellions spiral out of control.

Stolevski’s scripts always bear a line that pierces at the heart of life itself, and “Housekeeping for Beginners” is no exception. “It doesn’t go away, the needing,” Dita promises Vanesa, “even when you get old. It’s a nasty business.” It’s a beautifully, brutally apt way to describe a family, and the human condition, perfectly, concisely expressed in the way only Stolevski can.

———

‘HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS’

(In Albanian, Macedonian and Romani with English subtitles)

4 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content, language throughout and some teen drinking)

Running time: 1:47

How to watch: In theaters Friday

———

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

On Friday, April 5, the documentary “Girls State” premieres on Apple TV+, the much-anticipated sequel to the lauded 2020 documentary “Boys State,” also on Apple TV+. Directed by accomplished documentarians Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the film takes an anthropological approach to studying the inner workings of the weeklong political camps for American high schoolers sponsored by the American Legion. During each session the teenagers are required to create a fully working government through a series of elections, a microcosm of our own system.

While structured in the same way, with fly-on-the-wall cameras following a select few students during their experience, “Girls State” is naturally a very different film. Filmed at a Missouri university just weeks before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade, women’s rights and reproductive issues are a hot-button issue for the girls, among the other teenage troubles such as social anxieties, future worries and other personal issues that are thrown into stark relief in such a setting. But once again, it’s a fascinating documentary that argues that while the kids might be alright, there are certain aspects of the system that need an overhaul.

It’s yet another fascinating film from the duo of Moss and McBaine, who have collaborated on many documentaries, which intersect at the juncture of the political and personal.

Their most recent film was last year’s “The Mission,” a complicated portrait of the young American missionary John Chau, who was killed in 2018 when he attempted to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe on North Sentinel Island. Using interviews with loved ones and John’s diaries and letters, the filmmakers offered a look at why Chau set out on such a dangerous trip, diving in headfirst to examine his complex motivation. Released by NatGeo, “The Mission” is streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

McBaine has been a longtime producer for Moss, and before they collaborated as co-directors on “Boys State” and “The Mission,” she produced several films he directed including 2021’s “Mayor Pete,” a campaign trail doc about the presidential run of current Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. Stream it on Prime Video.

Moss’ breakout documentary was the 2014 Sundance hit “The Overnighters” (also produced by McBaine), about a North Dakota pastor offering shelter in his church to nomadic workers arriving in his oil boomtown looking for work. Once again a complex portrait of a complicated person whose life reflected a specific political reality, “The Overnighters” is a moving, surprising film that captures this moment in time in such granular detail because Moss immersed himself in the culture of this town. Stream it on Kanopy or rent it elsewhere online.

Moss also directed all five episodes of the 2019 Netflix documentary miniseries “The Family,” following the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet, who has written about a secretive conservative Christian group known as “The Family” and their influence on American politics. It’s a chilling and sobering uncovering of one of the shadowy organizations that has an outsize influence on our country. He also directed an episode of the 2018 Netflix miniseries“Dirty Money,” which looks at scandal and corruption in business, with Moss’ episode (Season 1, Episode 2) examining payday lenders. Stream both on Netflix.

Moss has an upcoming film called “War Game” on the way, but check out “Girls State” and “Boys State” on Apple TV+, and the rest of he and McBaine’s political docs, covering a wide array of fascinating topics.

———

(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Because, strangely enough, it all happens to be true.

Neighbors Edith Swan (Colman), a Bible-quoting spinster living with her aged parents, and Rose Gooding (Buckley), a widowed Irish immigrant with a young daughter, couldn’t be more different.

Edith virtually defines the era’s proper, corseted Englishwoman while the uninhibited Rose in her loose smocks rarely gets through a sentence without unleashing  F-bombs.

When Edith is horrified, traumatized even, by receiving obscenity-strewn hateful letters, she and the police immediately point to the most obvious suspect, Rose, who’s soon locked up.

“The fact that Jesse’s Rose isn’t corseted says so much about her freedom,” Colman, 50, said in a Zoom interview from Manhattan.  “She’s decided, ‘Screw this. I’m not going to be held back.’ So she is living the life that she’s chosen. But these other women are so restricted, aren’t they?”

Edith is more than a bit of sanctimonious pickle but for Colman, her comical contradictions were irresistible.

“Very simply, I really thought it’d be fun to play her. She looks lovely and is all sort of pious and fluttery eyelids and butter wouldn’t melt — and then you find out there’s a whole lot more going on! Which of course there is with all human beings. But I just thought it’d be so much fun to play both those things.”

Among the world’s most honored artists, Colman isn’t one to rest on past triumphs.  She’s recently starred in “Wonka,” a “Great Expectations” miniseries, made a guest appearance on “The Bear” and is now filming “Paddington in Peru.”

“I have this plan in my head that I’m going to do one film a year — and that’s never happened,” she said cheerfully. “Everyone wants to work because of ‘I might never work again.’ Every actor has that.

“When this appeared, I wanted to do it because I thought it would be fun.  I love the female-centric nature of it. It’s in the UK which is great, I’m not far from my family. And I love working — I think that’s our job.”

Among her many Emmys, Globes and BAFTAs is the Best Actress Oscar for “The Favourite.” Does he have a special place in her home? Does she ever say, “I’m going to bring you a little buddy one day”?

“I don’t talk to him enough. He’s in a cupboard. Because I feel a little embarrassed when people come to the house. It feels a bit showy-offy. He is very special and I do go and say ‘Hello Shiney.’ Maybe I should say, ‘I’m going to bring you a friend.’ I’ve never tried that.”

“Wicked Little Letters” opens April 5

The biopic form practically demands failure, or at least a series of narrative compromises made under pressure from so many factions: the real-life subject, or keepers of the now-deceased subject’s estate, nervous about an unsympathetic truth or two; the streamer or studio backing the project; and the filmmakers themselves, trying to do right by the person featured in the title, while finding a shape — and the ideal performer — to make the thing work.

“Shirley,” now streaming on Netflix, constitutes the latest frustrating, two-hour example of all that pressure. You don’t, however, detect any of it in the carefully detailed performance of Regina King as Shirley Chisholm, the first Black female member of the U.S. Congress, who campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972.

Watching King in scenes with the late, great Lance Reddick (as Chisholm advisor Wesley “Mac” Holder), or Terrence Howard (Arthur Hardwick, her second husband; they met as New York State legislators in 1966), or André Holland (as Chisholm’s rival presidential hopeful Walter Fauntroy), you can relish the skill sets of these performers — their sleight-of-hand ease with even the horsiest loads of exposition. This, too, can scarcely be avoided in any biopic: those moments when two characters are meant to be talking like they know each other well, and are well-acquainted with the background or context of whatever they’re discussing. Problem is, the audience isn’t. So the dialogue starts sounding like they’re speaking directly to the viewer, in bullet points.

“Shirley” struggles with many such moments. Writer-director John Ridley, who also produced, focuses the two hours he has on a few months in ’72, when Chisholm took on the political challenge of her life, seeking 1,500 delegates amid a pale male sea of skepticism. Nixon was set to go for a second Republican term pre-Watergate; in those days, scandalous and/or illegal presidential activity was enough for a vast majority of the party in power to ditch the man in charge. McGovern, the way-out-ahead Democratic front-runner, felt inevitable though he got creamed by Nixon in the end.

Did Chisholm and her better-known, better-funded competitors, from Humphrey to Muskie to Lindsay, have a chance? No, and yes. Campaigns turn on a series of dimes, and coin tosses with fate. In America, we’re besotted with underdog stories because they typically involve long-shots who end up winning. “Shirley” can’t work that way, although Chisholm proved an seriously inspirational political figure. She had her eye on the future, whether she would run the country in that future or not.

I wish the movie dramatized those harried campaign months more persuasively, without quite so many speech-y bits even when no one’s making any speeches. Five minutes into “Shirley” in a brief scene from Chisholm’s first congressional year, there’s a confrontation with a bigoted white Southern pol, fussed about this interloping Black woman from Brooklyn earning the same $42,500 annual salary he does. Does the scene work? Only as crude shorthand. It feels more like a biopic straining for hit-and-run impact, rather than a telling fragment in a real-life story.

The actors do all they can, all the time. Lucas Hedges portrays young, green law student Robert Gottlieb, who at 21 became Chisholm’s national student organizer; Christina Jackson, astutely delineating campaign worker and future Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s conflicted feelings about politics, adds welcome doses of subtlety. Along with Reddick and company, these two buoy a script gradually taking on more and more water.

King’s in charge, of course. Her real-life sister Reina King plays Chisholm’s sister Muriel, resentful of Shirley’s favored-daughter status. In their scenes, and in every scene elsewhere, the top-billed Oscar winner (King won for her work in “If Beale Street Could Talk”) works low-keyed wonders in selling what’s overstated in an understated, humanizing way. Chisholm came from Guyanese and Bajan (Barbadian) descent, and while King foregoes some vocal particulars (the sibilant “s,” mainly) she evokes Chisholm’s public persona and refreshing candor extremely well.

Writer-director Ridley, who won his own Oscar for adapting “12 Years a Slave,” has done solid work (the recent Apple miniseries “Five Days at Memorial”) and at least one directorial documentary project, the 1992 Los Angeles uprising documentary (“Let It Fall”), that is very close to great. With “Shirley” we’re close to almost-not-quite territory, and visually, Ridley sticks with conventional shot sequences of characters in frame, alone, either speaking or reacting. This makes fluidity and interpersonal flow pretty difficult. The political particulars of Chisholm’s presidential bid, and the question of why so many other candidate’s delegates got funneled into McGovern’s losing campaign, never risk much complication. Time is too short.

At one point King, as Chisholm, resists the advisors’ pleas to simplify her “messaging” (was that word in circulation 52 years ago?) by saying: “I am not leaving out the nuance!” In “Shirley,” the top-shelf actors aren’t, either. Even if their material does.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

“Shirley” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for profanity including racial slurs, brief violence and some smoking)

Running time: 1:57

How to watch: Now streaming on Netflix.

Wingard, who directed the neon-synth fever dream that was “Godzilla vs. Kong” in 2021, comes from the world of horror films, and he brings that same approach to his blockbusters, with a penchant for gleeful experimentation and over-the-top style. He drives this vehicle like he stole it, and with co-writers Simon Barrett and Terry Rossio, seems to throw every idea he’s ever had for a monster movie at the script. It’s a lot. It’s fun, but it’s a lot.

On the plus side, Wingard has arguably three of the best working actors in the game in this picture. Rebecca Hall and Brian Tyree Henry reprise their roles from “Godzilla vs. Kong,” and Wingard brings along the star of his 2014 thriller “The Guest,” Dan Stevens, who possesses a kind of radioactive charisma that’s almost too much to take in. With these three, you truly cannot go wrong, and Henry and Stevens, playing a blogger/podcaster and a wacky wild animal veterinarian, respectively, prove to be the most valuable players of the movie, after the title characters, of course.

To quickly get us caught up to speed, after the events of the last film, Kong now lives in the verdant paradise of Hollow Earth, which is nice but lonely, while Godzilla remains on the surface, very cutely napping in the Colosseum in between bouts of titan fighting. These two need to be kept apart, lest they rip each other to shreds, reducing major cities to rubble. However, when a distress signal emerges from Hollow Earth, Dr. Andrews (Hall), her daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle), her on-call vet Trapper (Stevens), and the fanboy blogger Bernie (Henry), along with a stern Scottish pilot Mikael (Alex Ferns), set out to find the origin of the call, and realize that maybe Godzilla and Kong need to find a way to come together to fight off other nefarious creatures.

When you multiply Godzilla by Kong, what do you get? When Wingard’s doing the math, it’s an earnest, wacky, hectic ride that often feels like being thrashed about in an IMAX seat. There’s a decidedly 1980s-inspired vibe to the tone and style, from the hot pinks and greens and synth-y score by Antonio Di Iorio and Tom Holkenborg, to the narrative that follows a journey into a fantastical underworld. There’s also a heavy emphasis on crystals as both plot device and aesthetic that offers this film a retro feel.

But about halfway through, one does get the nagging sensation that this has jumped the kaiju shark, as Wingard slams the gas and doesn’t let up. There are too many monsters, and as more and more are introduced, character falls away. There’s a bit of a harried energy to “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” which is fun until it becomes instantly tiresome and deafening.

‘GODZILLA X KONG: THE NEW EMPIRE’

Rated PG-13. At the AMC Boston Common, South Bay Center, Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, Landmark Kendall Square Cinema and suburban theaters

Grade: B-

It began in 1958 as a landmark breakthrough in the treatment of heroin addicts, confrontational therapy they called ‘The Synanon Game.’

Instead of demonizing addicts, Synanon saw them, like alcoholics in AA, as people who could learn sobriety. Synanon expanded to other states and cities and became national news. There was even “Synanon,” a 1965 Hollywood movie with Chuck Connors and Stella Stevens.

Funded by donations with a tax-exempt status, Synanon thrived until in the ‘70s its founder Charles “Chuck” Dederich became essentially a cult leader, dictatorial, paranoid and eventually charged with child abuse and attempted murder.

Producer-director Kennedy and her husband and producing partner Mark Bailey, who also is a co-writer, gained remarkable access to years of archival material for this four-part history that includes contemporary reflections, reactions and insight from past members.

“We started talking about this project four and a half years ago with HBO,” Kennedy, 55, began in a Zoom interview. “Part of our development process was, ‘Can we explore the Synanon Archive’?

“We came to understand pretty quickly that there was a lot of Archive but that the Synanon Trust owned it and they were not, at that point, willing to share it. And they documented a lot!”

She discovered that the many Synanons in various cities and locales were connected with The Wire, their communication system. Dederich and everyone else who spoke on The Wire were constantly recorded  — as were virtually nonstop video recordings of every kind of Synanon activity.

“Outside the Synanon Archive a number of artists who went through Synanon took their own photos and videos and we had those,” Kennedy said.  “But the Synanon Archive was the biggest.

“Chuck’s daughter, JD was a trustee along with a few others. I don’t like to speak for other people but I’m pretty comfortable in summarizing that she felt that Synanon, even though it did a lot of great things, it did a lot of damage to a lot of people.

“And she didn’t want the Archive being used in a way that could cause more damage or be more hurtful to anybody. We came to terms to make her comfortable.

“Then just three weeks before we were to ‘lock picture’ on the series, the Archive gave us the green light.

“That was really a breakthrough for us. We then had to go back to HBO to ask, ‘Can we go through all this Archive that’s now available to us?’

“They were enormously supportive and gave us the time that we needed to integrate this massive amount of material into the film.”

“The Synanon Fix” airs on HBO April 1 and will be available to stream on Max. New episodes debuting subsequent Mondays

Releasing March 29 on Netflix, the sports comedy-drama shines a light on the Homeless World Cup, an annual event in which, yes, homeless male and female footballers — soccer players to us — play for their countries in matches of four-on-four “street” soccer, which is played on a smaller field, er, pitch.

Made with the support of the event’s namesake organization and said to be inspired by true stories, “The Beautiful Game” focuses mainly on fellas comprising the English club and their coach, a former professional star player.

The direction by the suddenly busy Thea Sharrock — her film “Wicked Little Letters” debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and lands in theaters next week — and screenplay by Frank Cottrell-Boyce leave a lot to be desired.

The film has the flow of a match where neither team manages more than a few scoring opportunities, but it does eke out a win.

The ever-enjoyable Bill Nighy (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Living”) stars as the aforementioned player-turned-coach, Mal, who also spent time as a scout for a pro club. When we meet him, he is hunting for big game — former pro Vinny (Micheal Ward), who has been living out of his car for a stretch as he’s struggled to find steady work.
Mal explains to Vinny that he’s been involved with the Homeless World Cup for years and that he’s set to take his 12th team to the tournament, which this year is in Rome.

“You ever won it?” Vinny asks.

“It’s not about winning,” Mal says.

“You’re desperate to win it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t object.”

Mal tells him that every player at the tournament has a story to tell — “heartbreaking, unexpected, thrilling stories” — and seems to want Vinny to take part in the Homeless World Cup for reasons that go beyond the fact he clearly would be the team’s best player.

Vinny is the prideful type and initially rebuffs Mal, but perhaps eager to impress the young daughter he visits at a playground who’s being raised by his ex, he agrees to go.

With the possible exception of the team’s existing striker, Cal (Kit Young), the players warmly welcome Vinny into their supportive dynamic, but he chooses to keep his distance, even once they’re all in Rome and competing. He does provide some much-needed scoring punch, unabashedly installing a “pass it to me” core team strategy.
It isn’t the fault of Ward (“Empire of Light,” “The Old Guard”) that it’s so hard to warm to Vinny, as Sharrock, whose credits also include the controversial 2016 tearjerker “Me Before You,” and Cottrell-Boyce, perhaps best known for TV writing, fly too close to the sun with his character arc. Vinny simply is too hard to like for too long.

As a result, we wish “The Beautiful Game” gave us more time with Nighy’s Mal, who habitually talks to his beloved late wife. Still, there seems to be a little chemistry between him and Gabriella (Valeria Golino of “Rain Man” fame), who helps run the event and talks a little trash on behalf of her host Italian squad. it feels like a missed opportunity not to make more out of, um, “Mal-riella,” if we may be so bold, than the movie does.

“The Beautiful Game” includes mini-subplots involving the English players, the closest to impactful of which involves Nathan (Callum Scott Howells), a recovering heroin addict who tries hard to connect with his cold roommate, Vinny.

Thinking “Ted Lasso” crossed with “Next Goal Wins” gets you in the ballpark as to what “The Beautiful Game” has to offer, although it’s not as strong as either the Apple TV+ hit or the 2023 film from writer-director Taika Waititi, respectively.

Despite all its fumbling about, “The Beautiful Game” succeeds as a celebration of the Homeless World Cup, championing not only what the experience means for those who participate in it but also its power to inspire others around the world./Tribune News Service

‘THE BEAUTIFUL GAME’

Rated PG-13, On Netflix

Grade: B-

Releasing this week on Netflix, the sports comedy-drama shines a light on the Homeless World Cup, an annual event in which, yes, homeless male and female footballers — soccer players to us — play for their countries in matches of four-on-four “street” soccer, which is played on a smaller field, er, pitch.

Made with the support of the event’s namesake organization and said to be inspired by true stories, “The Beautiful Game” focuses mainly on fellas comprising the English club and their coach, a former professional star player.

The direction by the suddenly busy Thea Sharrock — her film “Wicked Little Letters” debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and lands in Northeast Ohio theaters next week — and screenplay by Frank Cottrell-Boyce leave a lot to be desired.

The film has the flow of a match where neither team manages more than a few scoring opportunities, but it does eke out a win.

The ever-enjoyable Bill Nighy (“The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” “Living”) stars as the aforementioned player-turned-coach, Mal, who also spent time as a scout for a pro club. When we meet him, he is hunting for big game — former pro Vinny (Micheal Ward), who has been living out of his car for a stretch as he’s struggled to find steady work.

Mal explains to Vinny that he’s been involved with the Homeless World Cup for years and that he’s set to take his 12th team to the tournament, which this year is in Rome.

“You ever won it?” Vinny asks.

“It’s not about winning,” Mal says.

“You’re desperate to win it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t object.”

Mal tells him that every player at the tournament has a story to tell — “heartbreaking, unexpected, thrilling stories” — and seems to want Vinny to take part in the Homeless World Cup for reasons that go beyond the fact he clearly would be the team’s best player.

Vinny is the prideful type and initially rebuffs Mal, but perhaps eager to impress the young daughter he visits at a playground who’s being raised by his ex, he agrees to go.

With the possible exception of the team’s existing striker, Cal (Kit Young), the players warmly welcome Vinny into their supportive dynamic, but he chooses to keep his distance, even once they’re all in Rome and competing. He does provide some much-needed scoring punch, unabashedly installing a “pass it to me” core team strategy.

It isn’t the fault of Ward (“Empire of Light,” “The Old Guard”) that it’s so hard to warm to Vinny, as Sharrock, whose credits also include the controversial 2016 tearjerker “Me Before You,” and Cottrell-Boyce, perhaps best known for TV writing, fly too close to the sun with his character arc. Vinny simply is too hard to like for too long.

As a result, we wish “The Beautiful Game” gave us more time with Nighy’s Mal, who habitually talks to his beloved late wife. Still, there seems to be a little chemistry between him and Gabriella (Valeria Golino of “Rain Man” fame), who helps run the event and talks a little trash on behalf of her host Italian squad. it feels like a missed opportunity not to make more out of, um, “Mal-riella,” if we may be so bold, than the movie does.

“The Beautiful Game” includes mini-subplots involving the English players, the closest to impactful of which involves Nathan (Callum Scott Howells), a recovering heroin addict who tries hard to connect with his cold roommate, Vinny.

The movie also devotes some attention to two other teams: South Africa, expected to be the dominant squad in England’s group before running into travel trouble; and Japan, competing for the first time. Thanks to the performance of Susan Wokoma as the infectiously enthusiastic nun coaching the South African team, the former element adds a little something to the proceedings. (The latter adds very little.)

Lastly, we spend a little time with Rosita (Cristina Rodlo), a hugely talented player for the U.S. who catches the eye of British player Jason (Sheyi Cole), who doesn’t make the best of first impressions. After getting past that, they spend a bit of time together, with Rosita explaining why the Homeless World Cup — and soccer in general — could mean so much to her future.

Thinking “Ted Lasso” crossed with “Next Goal Wins” gets you in the ballpark as to what “The Beautiful Game” has to offer, although it’s not as strong as either the Apple TV+ hit or the 2023 film from writer-director Taika Waititi, respectively.

Despite all its fumbling about, “The Beautiful Game” succeeds as a celebration of the Homeless World Cup, championing not only what the experience means for those who participate in it but also its power to inspire others around the world.

According to the film’s production notes, the event has taken place 18 times since its inaugural 2003 event in Graz, Austria. After three years off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Homeless World Cup took place last year in Sacramento, California, with this year’s set for Seoul, South Korea, in September.

A number of non-speaking roles in the film are played by those who have competed in the affair, lending that little bit of authenticity to “The Beautiful Game.”

In the end, what Mal says about the Homeless World Cup may be true, that it’s not about winning. Instead, it would seem to be about lifting the spirit, as the movie inspired by it does.

‘The Beautiful Game’

Where: Netflix

When: March 29

Rated: PG-13 for some language, a suggestive reference, brief partial nudity and drug references

Runtime: 2 hours, 5 minutes

Stars (of four): 2.5

If you want to head to the theaters, check out Luc Besson’s wacky “DogMan” and our find of the week “Lousy Carter” (showing one night only in San Francisco).

Here’s our roundup.

“Renegade Nell”: “Happy Valley” creator Sally Wainwright enlivens the popular tween fantasy-tinged genre with this exemplary female powered Disney+ series set in 18th-century England. In eight addictive episodes, the on-point filmmaker succeeds where others have failed, injecting just the right doses of intrigue and humor into a quietly subversive feminist story.

“Nell” is made stronger by its well-written characters. And it is purpose-driven Nell (Louisa Harland, channeling some Jessie Buckley intensity) — a legend in the making — who anchors it. She’s gained not only notoriety but superpowers via a Tinkerbell-esque sidekick Billy Blind (Nick Mohammed).

When Nell and her two sisters flee from those who want to keep them quiet, their paths continue to cross with a duplicitous highwayman/aristocrat (Frank Dillane, providing much of the humor) who is the younger paramour of an irresponsible, gossip-mongering newspaper editor (Joely Richardson, living it up here), and a privileged brother (Jake Dunne) and sister (Alice Kremelberg) who are enabled int their tapping to the dark side by the Earl of Poynton (Adrian Lester).

There are many more engaging characters and a slew of clever cameos from British stars. Each play essential parts in the action, and do their fair share of conniving and derring-do to aid or defeat the grand, evil purposes of the bad guys. “Renegade Nell” gallops ahead of other Disney+ offerings by telling a new story tremendously well, and giving us a young woman who defies the ruling class to gain not only justice but freedom. Details: 3½ stars out of 4; all episodes available starting March 29.

“A Gentleman in Moscow”: Anyone who gulped down Amor Towles’ 2016 literary page-turner and then campaigned friends to follow suit will approach Showtime’s eight-part adaptation with a touch of trepidation. Rest easy, dear readers, showrunner and executive producer Ben Vanstone and creator/writer Joe Murtagh have done this one a solid and nothing more.

Ewan McGregor initially seems like an odd casting choice to play Count Alexander Rostov — a 1920s aristocrat whose mouthy ways lead to his getting forever confined by a Bolshevik court panel to the ritzy Metropol hotel. But he grows on you and gives another one of his emotionally complex performances, even if he’s not a Russian.

What might look on the outside look like a cushy sentence is anything but as Rostov’s ordered to never step outside and is confined within the dilapidated, uncomfortable accommodations in a drafty, chilly attic. Down below, he befriends many: confident actress Anna Urbanova (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, giving a classic, classy performance) who relishes her healthy sexual appetite, and a precocious child instrumental in playing a critical, life-changing part in his life as the decades fly by and the screws get tightened on dissent.

Unlike some series, the extended length of this one benefits the decades-spanning story arc, with each episode cycling us through Russian history and showing how the changing political winds whisked away some in power leaving the powerless to find strength, love and greater meaning. Details: 3 stars; starts streaming March 29 on Paramount+ (with Showtime) and then on March 31 on Showtime.

“STEVE! (martin) a documentary in 2 pieces”: The first part of Morgan Neville’s entirely worthwhile two-part Apple TV+ series blows the audience away in its creative approach in charting comedian Steve Martin’s childhood, fledgling stand-up career and then his phenomenally successful stage shows. Told entirely without the fallback plan of a talking head, it overlays interviews with Martin and others with video and images of the time. It’s an immersive experience and one of the most creative and unique approaches used for a documentary about a famous person.

The second part is less adventurous but finds Steve at home, preparing for a show with his friend and “Only Murders in the Building” co-star Martin Short, his wife, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, friend Tina Fey and costar Diane Keaton, amongst others. It focuses more on his film career, and features clips from some of his biggest successes (“The Jerk,” “Parenthood”) and his biggest failures (“Pennies From Heaven” and Nora Ephron’s “Mixed Nuts”). The energy and momentum of the first part deflates in the second, but it is in tempo with the man himself, as a much more content, less anxiety-ridden Martin candidly reflects on the films, his greatest loves (including art), his emotionally shut-off father and a renaissance-like career that includes author, painter and playwright amongst other talents. It is a telling glimpse into the life of a creative artist who learns the invaluable truth that all the trappings of success mean so little until you’ve built a place you call home. It’s an exceptional documentary, even if the second half can’t quite keep up with the first. Details: 3½ stars; drops March 29 on Apple TV+.

“DogMan”: Luc Besson’s bizarro but commendable character study swings from great to awful, sometimes in a matter of seconds. What prevents its erratic tendencies from going entirely off leash is Caleb Landry Jones’ gutsy, fully committed performance. You can’t take your eyes off this underrated actor. He’s unforgettable as Douglas Munrow, a loner drag performer (he does a very cool Marilyn) in a wheelchair who’s more at home with his own pack of scraggly dogs than he is with humans. He has a good reason — his cruel dog-fighting father kicked him out and locked him in the filthy backyard kennel till he broke out. The dogs were the only ones who showed Douglas unconditional love and also protected him. Besson wrote this outlandish story, and while his directing is better than his screenwriting there is an undeniable flair to everything about this weird affair. Yes, it continually goes on and off the rails, but then it spits you off into an unexpected, but rather ingenious, place at the end. So given all that, is it worth seeing? Yes, but only if you plunge rather than lean into its chaotic  mindset from the very start. Details: 2.5 stars, in theaters Friday.

Find of the week

“Lousy Carter”: Indie filmmaker Bob Byington’s biting comedy fails on all counts in the originality department with its worn-out premise of a pompous professional – in this case a college literature professor who’s teaching a master’s course on “The Great Gatsby” –  confronting mortality when his doc says he has six months to live. A “death sentence” is one of the most overused plots but Byington’s dry-witted black comedy works better than the bulk of ‘em because it is wickedly funny and uncompromising and that’s due to the acidic screenwriting from Byington and the wry lead performance from David Krumholtz as a former dreamer with a big, hardly commercial idea to make an animated movie out of a Nabokov novel. Byington’s cast this droll comedy well with funny turns from actors portraying Carter’s forthright ex-girlfriend (Oliva Thirlby), a funeral-loving grad student (Luxy Banner) who challenges him all the time and his sorta best friend (Martin Starr) and his horny wife (Jocelyn DeBoer). Told in just under 80 minutes, “Lousy Carter” made me laugh uncomfortably quite often and then even shocked me at the end. Details: 3 stars; screens March 31 at the Roxie in San Francisco; also available On Demand starting March 29.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

We open in Belfast in 1974, just moments before a car bombing takes six lives, including those of several children. The perpetrators, a group of Irish Republican Army foot soldiers, beat a hasty retreat for a small village, Glencolmcille in County Donegal, Ireland. It just so happens to be the same place where Finbar Murphy (Neeson) has been trying to retire from a secretive life as a hit man.

This unique geographic, historical and political milieu confers a certain intrigue to this otherwise familiar fare, but the story itself is pure Western, the classic genre explicitly referenced in the plaintive score by Diego, Nora and Lionel Baldenweg, and in the seasoned narrative beats in the script by Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane.

Finbar is the longtime gunfighter who works by a strict moral code, looking to finally hang up his spurs and domesticate himself. When a group of baddies invade his small town and rough up the vulnerable residents, he has to put his talents to use one last time in order to protect the homestead.

Colm Meaney co-stars as Finbar’s broker, Ciarán Hinds as the local Garda unaware of his friend’s line of work, and Jack Gleeson of “Game of Thrones” is unrecognizable as a merry young hit man with a blackly Irish sense of humor. But the most terrifying person on screen is Kerry Condon, playing the steely IRA warrior Doireann McCann (possibly inspired by the notorious Dolours Price), the leader of the gang who has brought her cohort to Glencolmcille. When her loathsome brother Curtis (Desmond Eastwood) goes missing, Doireann emerges from hiding with vengeance in her heart.

Condon was nominated for an Oscar for her role in Martin McDonagh’s 2022 “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a film that took a glancing metaphorical approach to its Troubles themes. “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” is direct and obvious. This longtime national conflict comes home to roost in a small town, and while the hero and antagonist are far more similar than they think, sharing the same kind of fierce loyalty to their loved ones and personal beliefs, their goals put them at odds with each other. The political conflict is simultaneously simple but abstracted from the blood that soaks the streets of this small village.

There’s no real profound political commentary in “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” the setting providing the background and plot stakes. This is a true Western tale set among the rolling green hills of Ireland, the landscape captured beautifully by cinematographer Tom Stern. Condon is utterly captivating playing a brutal villain, and no one plays a valiantly chagrined hero like Neeson, sorrowful and suffering. In the “Neeson’s Skills” canon, “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” proves to be a gem, the performances elevating this enjoyably pulpy thriller.

“In the Land of Saints and Sinners” contains violence and language throughout

‘IN THE LAND OF SAINTS AND SINNERS’

Rated R. At the AMC Boston Common, Causeway and suburban theaters.

Grade: A-

Sheridan, 27, a producer as well as star, calls it “A movie full of hope. Inherently, playing a paramedic’s life comes with darkness. Because they are being called to people at their worst moments, right?

“They are the shepherds of society if you will. They try to guide people to help, to the light.

“Also,” he added in a Zoom interview, “paramedics hate being called ‘ambulance drivers’! That’s one thing I learned through the process of making this: EMTs” – Emergency Medical Technicians – “are different than paramedics who I think are a super essential part of our society.

“Because most people don’t know much about their lives, the ambition of this film is to get really close and see what they deal with on a daily basis.”

Sheridan and Penn were determined to get it right.  “Sean obviously has a very storied career and is someone I really admire and look up to. He takes his job very seriously. You know he has a special relationship with first responders through some of the work he’s done in his personal life.

“For this, we both were excited to pursue this journey and convey the lives of paramedics, people who are so important in our society.

“We were leaning on each other through the process of training,  doing ride-alongs three or four nights a week for two months leading up to shooting the film.

“Then we were in a classroom environment together, learning different tricks of the trade, so to speak.”

There’s a religious element to Sheridan’s struggling paramedic Ollie Cross.  His zippered jacket is adorned with an elaborate set of wings. In his tiny Chinatown apartment there’s the winged St. Michael the Archangel on the wall. Like his name, Ollie has a cross to bear.

“Yes, there is the symbology of the Archangel Michael. These paramedics are shepherds, so there’s definitely a resonance there of carrying the weight of that responsibility in society.

“What this is really about is the chaos and content of the job and how that can slip into your personal life. You have to compartmentalize these things and separate the personal from their professional life – and is that possible?

“Especially when what you see on a daily basis is quite impactful and emotional. The EMS community in New York has had quite a few suicides.

“What the film explores is what these people face on a day to day basis and how it infiltrates their personal life, their relationships. And their emotional mental state.”

“Asphalt City” opens March 29

Streaming Friday, March 29, on Apple TV+ comes a revealing two-part documentary about beloved comedian Steve Martin, directed by Oscar winning “20 Feet from Stardom” director Morgan Neville. “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” is a truly unique documentary project, the two halves distinctly different but fitting together to create an illuminating portrait of Martin and his relationship to fame and creativity.

The first half “Then” tracks his early life, through childhood, the budding of his comedy career, his boundary-pushing stand-up shows, and his meteoric rise to fame in the 1970s, becoming a pop culture sensation through his platinum-selling comedy albums, sold-out tours and many appearances hosting “Saturday Night Live.” The first part ends with Martin’s transition to a film career with “The Jerk,” and his first major stumble with the poorly received “Pennies from Heaven.”

The second half of the two-part film, titled “Now,” follows Martin in the present day, co-starring on the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building” with his longtime friend and collaborator Martin Short, living a private life with his wife and young daughter. In contrast to the chaotic frenzy of his life in the 1970s, Neville captures Martin in moments of quiet contentment, biking with Short through Santa Barbara, fixing easy meals on the road, and reflecting on his life. It’s a fascinating and riveting watch, in which the elusive star opens up like never before about the highs and lows of his personal life and career.

But while “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces,” is an absorbing watch, it will likely make you want to revisit his filmography, especially the early titles from the late 1970s and ’80s on which the documentary focuses. So here’s a little primer of where to watch some of Steve Martin’s earliest films, as an accompaniment to the doc.

His breakout role was obviously in “The Jerk” (1979), which he wrote and Carl Reiner directed. Martin stars as a simple country boy who heads off for life in the big city. The film was a massive hit and cemented Martin as a star. Stream it on Showtime or rent it elsewhere. In 1982, Martin and Reiner reunited for the noir parody “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”

The documentary also focuses on the 1981 flop “Pennies from Heaven,” a 1930s-style movie musical directed by Herbert Ross and co-starring Bernadette Peters and Christopher Walken. Martin in a sincere mode was not warmly received by critics and audiences, and the film explores how that failure was a deep wound for Martin. A fascinating object in his career history, rent “Pennies from Heaven” on all digital platforms.

Of course, there’s the iconic 1986 comedy “Three Amigos!,” which Martin wrote with Lorne Michaels and Randy Newman, directed by John Landis and co-starring Short and “SNL” star Chevy Chase. Stream it on AMC+, The Roku Channel, or rent it elsewhere.

But while he was making these rom-coms, he was also starring as a beloved movie dad, in 1989’s “Parenthood,” directed by Ron Howard, heading up an all-star ensemble cast including Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Wiest, Jason Robards, Rick Moranis, Martha Plimpton, Keanu Reeves and Joaquin Phoenix. Stream it on Netflix. He also starred in the 1991 film “Father of the Bride” opposite Diane Keaton and Kimberly Williams-Paisley (plus Short and a tiny Kieran Culkin). Stream it on Disney+ or rent.

There are so many more fantastic Steve Martin movies, but the documentary will inspire you to revisit these early favorites in his career, so consider this the companion guide to “Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces” on Apple TV+.

(Katie Walsh is the Tribune News Service film critic and co-host of the “Miami Nice” podcast.)

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

In the late 1990s, NBC ran a promotional campaign with the slogan, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you,” aimed at boosting summer reruns of such hits as “Mad About You” and “Frasier.”

Updated for 2024, the line would be, “If you haven’t streamed it, it’s new to you.”

Original series created to drive new subscribers to streaming platforms are showing up more frequently on linear broadcast and cable TV networks. Media companies are looking to expose the programs to broader audiences and fill out their lineups to help pay the freight as they battle to keep pace with Netflix.

This summer, CBS will be running the first season of the Taylor Sheridan crime drama “Tulsa King” starring Sylvester Stallone — a show that was made for streamer Paramount+. You can binge rival Peacock’s new reality series “The McBee Dynasty,” but if you want to kick it old school, individual episodes air weekly on parent company NBCUniversal’s USA Network.

In January, ABC aired the first season of the Hulu hit “Only Murders in the Building,” It performed well enough for the network to plan on airing another season at some point in the future.

The trend runs counter to the perception that viewers looking for non-sports entertainment programming have abandoned linear TV.

It may be true that many younger consumers who have grown up with streaming don’t even own a TV set, which they see as a gadget to bombard their parents and grandparents with pharmaceutical drug commercials all day. But for media companies, linear TV, while on the decline with shrinking ratings and cord-cutting, has turned into a marketing tool that expands public awareness of their streaming shows.

Meanwhile, the streaming businesses owned by legacy media companies such as NBCUniversal parent Comcast Corp., Paramount Global and Disney are all under pressure from Wall Street to generate profits. Turning to linear networks is a means of generating more revenue to help monetize their investments in streaming.

“These companies are hemorrhaging money [on streaming],” said Doug Herzog, a veteran cable and broadcast executive. “None of it is working great. That’s the issue. They are trying things out because that’s what they should be doing.”

Paramount Global Chief Financial Officer Naveen Chopra summed up the approach at an investor conference where he said his company aims to get “the most we possibly can out of every single dollar that we invest in content.”

Executives say viewers can expect to see more original programs created exclusively for streaming services pop up on broadcast and cable channels.

That’s because the broadcast networks have the ability to reach more than 95% of the homes in the U.S. While cord-cutting has reduced the number of homes getting pay TV, major cable networks are connected to about 70 million homes, still more than most subscriber-based streaming services. Peacock, for example, has about 30 million paying subscribers.

Streaming shows can become hits and cultural touchstones, but it’s harder for them to reach the kind of critical mass that big network TV series such as “Friends” once achieved. That’s why the legacy companies are finding that shows already exposed on streaming can pass as original programming on linear TV.

“It’s something we will continue to do because what you see in a fragmented marketplace — as popular as these shows are — there are still people who have not seen them,” said Craig Erwich, who as president of the Disney Television Group oversees ABC and Hulu. “Putting them in different places and telling people they are there is always additive. It’s never cannibalistic.”

With a cast that includes Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez, “Only Murders in the Building” is a show with the kind of broad appeal linear TV networks still seek, requiring just a few edits of foul language.

Disney found that half of the viewers who watched “Only Murders” on ABC were not signed up to Hulu, which has almost 50 million subscribers. After the series aired on the broadcast network, viewers wanted more. The hours of viewing for the first two seasons of the program rose by 40% on its original streaming home.

“It was new to a lot of people,” Erwich noted. “It surprises me because the show is so wildly popular in both consumption and critical acclaim that you start to think that everybody who wants to see this has seen it. But it’s a big country and there are many different types of people who want to watch TV in many different types of ways.”

NBCUniversal similarly saw viewers flock to Peacock to watch the second season of the medical anthology drama “Dr. Death,” after episodes from Season 1 aired on NBC. Viewing of the show on Peacock rose 58%.

“Only Murders” came in handy for ABC, as last year’s strikes by Hollywood screenwriters and actors had shut down production for months and cut off the pipeline of fresh programming. But the network was looking for a way to deploy the show well before the labor stoppages became a factor, executives said.

Streaming shows are likely to show up on the networks during the summer months, when repeats can no longer draw a sizable crowd. Rather than investing in original series for a smaller available audience, CBS can turn to a streaming show with a high-profile star such as “Tulsa King,” which features Stallone as a crime boss.

Last week, NBCUniversal’s Peacock unveiled a new serialized reality show, “The McBee Dynasty,” which tells the story of a family ranch and the four brothers vying to take over the business from their patriarch. The entire series is available to stream on Peacock while individual episodes air Monday nights after “WWE Raw” on USA Network.

Funneling the nearly 2 million WWE fans per week into the Peacock series uses one of the most time-honored stunts in the TV playbook.

The notion of a TV schedule where viewers are compelled to make an appointment to watch shows has almost become an anachronism in the age of streaming video on demand. But pulling an audience from one time period to the next remains the most efficient way to drive millions of viewers into sampling a new program, especially following live events or reality competition shows that are best enjoyed by watching in real time.

“The concept of a show-to-show audience flow is real,” said Frances Berwick, chairman of NBCUniversal Entertainment. “There is still a tremendous amount of value in it.”

Bravo aired the first season of the Peacock reality competition “Traitors” ahead of the streaming debut of its second batch. It was an easy fit, Berwick noted, as several of the players on the program come from the Bravo slate of reality shows such as “Below Deck.”

“We’ll do it where it makes sense and we have the right content,” Berwick said.

Most streaming shows making it to linear TV are staying under the same corporate umbrella. But it may be only a matter of time before networks regularly provide a second window for original shows created for platforms that they do not own. It’s already happening.

Fox recently cut a deal with Amazon’s Prime Video to get a broadcast run of the game show “The 1% Club” a week after episodes make their streaming debut. The CW is currently airing the Canadian sitcom “Children Ruin Everything,” which was created for the Roku Channel.

Similar deals and experiments are probably ahead in the effort to get programs in front of enough viewers to build them into profitable assets.

“We’re going to see a lot of creativity,” Berwick said. “Good content is good content.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

With a prodigious 400 film scores Morricone, 91 when he died in 2020, is known for his many Sergio Leone movies beginning with “A Fistful of Dollars” and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables” and his Oscar winner, Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight.”

“Ennio” reveals a musical childhood. His father was a trumpeter who decided, no questions asked, that his son would be one as well.

Morricone’s rise began as an arranger-composer of hit pop songs for ‘60s singers on Italian TV shows before his remarkable film career.

“From the very beginning, I wanted the structure of the film to be very polyphonic and not to be a traditional documentary where the thing that mattered the most were the interviews,” Tornatore said from his Rome office in a virtual interview via a translator.  “Instead, I wanted to follow the laws not of audio-visual language but by the music and the structure.

“So the images, interviews, film sequences had to follow the laws of music. What came out in the end was really nice, an unusual approach to documentary.”

Morricone as a serious conservatory student dreamed of a life composing classical concerts. Was he conflicted making movie music? Was that conflict ever resolved?

“In a certain sense, that is true,” Tornatore answered. “That was the deepest interior conflict of Ennio’s life — because he had no prejudices. For his entire life, he played a very important role in making popular music more ‘cultured’ — more high art we could say. And making high art classical music more open to the public.

“In the 1950s this was not a very easy path to follow. It was an era in which the idea of using a musical talent and combining it with making money was regarded with great suspicion.

“But he always tried to keep a great balance between the two — because he loved classical music! But he also loved cinema. Cinema wasn’t just a backup job for him.

“In doing what he did, he also changed the way that music is composed for film.”

Is Morricone worthy of being compared to Mozart and Beethoven?  Will he be remembered 200 years from now?

“That’s a very delicate subject. When someone said that to Ennio he was embarrassed and rejected that comparison. He said, ‘You know what? Let’s wait 200 years and see.’

“But John Williams came out and said that, ‘In 200 years, your music would still be remembered.’”

“Ennio” opens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre March 29

Folks, this week has been one of those bouts. First, it was the new “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” (verdict: too much “heart” and digital mayhem, not enough funny). And now, streaming on Prime Video, we have another ’80s-derived throwback, the “Road House” remake with Jake Gyllenhaal.

The 1989 Patrick Swayze edition, costarring Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, Kathleen Wilhoite and, singing along with “Sh-Boom,” Ben Gazzara, was nothing but ridiculous trash. And fun. Calling it “human-scaled” makes the old “Road House” sound as if it took place somewhere on planet Earth, among humans, which isn’t really true. And yet who says we can’t enjoy a sustained feat of complete fraudulence, if the spirit’s right and a movie takes some downtime for love scenes between beat-downs?

The new “Road House” has no time for sex. Compared with the old one, it’s 30 times bloodier and one-third as fun. Still, there are things to recommend it, namely the Irishman.

The action has been relocated from outside Kansas City to the fictional Glass Key, Florida. Screenwriters Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry establish bouncer Dalton as a suicidal, scandal-clouded Ultimate Fighting Championship middleweight with more baggage than Swayze’s Dalton ever lugged. Traveling by Greyhound, Dalton has come to the Florida Keys to take a job at the beachfront bar owned by Frankie (Jessica Williams). She needs a legit set of abs to control her insanely unruly customers and keep the peace.

That Dalton does, violently. Director Doug Liman escalates the bone-crunch melees with propulsive crimson relish, albeit with tons of editing cheats and medium-good digital trickery. The narrative obstacles in “Road House” carry over from the ’89 movie; there’s a corrupt crime family running amok, with Billy Magnussen amusingly detestable as the primary scumbag. Once again, a discreetly smoldering local doctor (Daniela Melchior) patches up Dalton after his initial run-in with the local rabble, and sees this mysterious, courtly stranger as potential date-night material.

The old “Road House” dripped with casually rampant misogyny disguised as examples of the ungentlemanly bad behavior Dalton must vanquish. Most of that ambiance is gone here. So is any trace of actual sensual anything. The central “romance” this time barely registers. Reductively, you could put it this way: Liman’s “Road House” gets the job done, but it’s the wrong job, and the ratios are off. When movie fantasies like this reduce the sexual current between its leads to nil, the emphasis on crazier and crazier brutality starts feeling not just jaded, or bloodthirsty, but a drag.

On the other hand, you know who’s great in this? Conor McGregor, best known as an Irish UFC star, making his feature debut in “Road House” as Knox, the special guest assailant the bad guys hire to dispose of Dalton. McGregor’s a born entertainer, delightfully overripe and dementedly committed to every close-up and every strutting threat of grievous bodily harm. His bare bottom gets a wittily star-making entrance of its own, in a traveling shot that goes so long, it’s basically a “Road House” spinoff.

Gyllenhaal has his moments; he finds some wit in Dalton’s zingers, and in his scenes with the local bookstore owner’s teenage daughter (Hannah Love Lanier), the star gets a pleasant “Shane” vibe going. To be sure, “Road House” succumbs to its own bouts of reductivist critique, or self-critique. At one point the scrappy, baseball bat-wielding kid summarizes the stranger’s arrival in Western movie genre terms: “Local townsfolk send for hero to help clean up the rowdy saloon.” Then she adds: “You know. That crap.”

“Road House” — 2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for nudity, violence, alcohol use and foul language)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: Now streaming on Prime Video

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

FORT WORTH, Texas — The story of a North Texas couple, who embezzled nearly $17 million from a fruitcake company, is getting a film adaption thanks to actress Jennifer Garner and a Fort Worth, Texas, company.

Deadline has revealed that Garner and Paul Walter Hauser joined “Fruitcake,” a movie about the embezzlement case that rocked Corsicana-based Collin Street Bakery. It is a sordid tale of greed and broken trust that ultimately leads to a nest of diamonds, expensive cars and trips to exotic resorts on private jets.

Hauser is set to play the bakery’s accountant Sandy Jenkins, who embezzled $16.6 million out of the company from 2004 to 2013. Garner will play Jenkins’ wife, Kay.

In 2015, Sandy Jenkins was sentenced to 10 years in prison and died four years later at a Fort Worth federal prison hospital. Kay Jenkins was sentenced to five years probation and to complete 100 hours of community service.

Max Winkler is directing the film that’s based off the Texas Monthly article “Just Deserts.” Trey Selman wrote the script and is a producer on the movie, along with Fort Worth native Red Sanders.

Sanders, who owns and operates local video production company Red Productions, said he’s particularly familiar with the bakery story.

“They pitched the story and I was like, ‘I love that story, I know it well’,” Sanders told the Star-Telegram. “My cousin owns the fruitcake bakery that it happened too and they’re like, ‘Yeah right’.”

Sanders first caught wind of the bakery film adaption at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017, which he attended as a producer for the movie “One Percent More Humid.”

It was there where Sanders met Winkler, who’s first movie, “Flower,” also premiered at the festival. After reading Selman’s “Fruitcake” script on the flight back to Texas, and having met Winkler, Sanders was all in on the the project.

In May 2019, it was announced that Will Ferrell and Laura Dern had been cast in the project as Sandy and Kay Jenkins. By February 2020, the rest of the cast was formalized.

But it would be all for naught, as the world shut down just weeks later as reports of COVID-19 infections spread and a pall hung across the globe from an enigmatic pandemic.

“We were planning to shoot in summer 2020 and that got totally derailed,” Sanders said.

With the first iteration of the fruitcake story on ice, the tale found new life as a documentary.

Sanders began working with director Celia Aniskovich on a television project titled “Fruitcake Fraud,” which landed on Discovery+ in 2021. While a success for the streamer, Sanders held on to ambitions of giving the story the full big screen treatment.

Things picked up steam last summer when Texas Monthly came aboard, but again, a few weeks later the project hit another brick wall. Both the Writer’s Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) took to the picket lines, pushing the project’s timeline back even more.

After both strikes ended towards the end of last year, work picked up again on “Fruitcake.” This time Garner and Hauser had joined the cast.

“It’s been one of these things of like, ‘Okay, I’m a producer and I’m stubborn. I love this story, I love Trey’s writing in it’,” Sanders said. “This has to be made.”

The “Fruitcake” story is firmly set in North Texas and Sanders said they hope to shoot the movie in the same place.

With Garner and Hauser on board, the next step in the filmmaking process is finalizing the rest of the cast and applying for production incentives. Like many states, Texas offers tax incentives such as cash grants for productions that film in state.

After being approved for incentives, the project would move into pre-production and eventually begin shooting.

“Just because you say you’re gonna film in Texas doesn’t mean that you’re approved for incentives,” Sanders said. “We gotta see if we’re actually approved.”

If the production does end up shooting in North Texas, Sanders said they’ll aim to hire workers from the area. A boon for two local entities, the Fort Worth Film Commission and Tarrant County College, who had partnered on a new training program last fall. Their mission: Grow film-related jobs in the region. Students can gain certifications in construction, lighting and electric work.

For anyone looking to work on productions filming in North Texas, whether that be on “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan’s numerous shows such as “Landman,” or on “Fruitcake,” Sanders said enrolling in the program is the way to go.

“If we are to shoot here, we’ve got to make sure that the workforce continues to grow here,” Sanders said.

©2024 Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Visit star-telegram.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

McDonald’s comments came during an interview on Audacy’s 92.3 The Fan on Friday, and while he was hesitant to reveal the news “because I don’t want to be a liar,” he said, sources close to the matter confirmed to Deadline that the film is being developed for Netflix.

“I saw Adam about two weeks ago, and he says to me, ‘McDonald, you’re gonna love this,’” the 69-year-old actor revealed in his interview. “I said, ‘What?’ He says, ‘How about that,’ and he shows me the first draft of Happy Gilmore 2.”

“I thought, ‘Well, that would be awesome.’ So, it’s in the works. Fans demand it, dammit!” McDonald added.

Sandler and his Happy Madison Productions, which gets its name from a combination of “Happy Gilmore” and another 90s Sandler comedy “Billy Madison,” have had a long-standing agreement with Netflix, which led to him being Hollywood’s highest-paid actor last year.

The 57-year-old “SNL” alum earned roughly $73 million acting in and producing three films in 2023: “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” “The Out-Laws,” and “Murder Mystery 2.”

When Sandler released “Happy Gilmore” in 1996, the film grossed over $82 million worldwide and has become one of his most popular films in the years since.

In addition to co-writing the film, he starred as the film’s main character, a down-on-his-luck hockey player with a temper, who discovers a hidden talent for golfing.

The news of the supposed sequel comes just one month after the death of actor Carl Weathers, who starred alongside Sandler in the film as Chubbs Peterson, a golf coach who once had his hand bitten off by an alligator.

Neither Sandler nor Netflix have commented yet on the reported “Happy Gilmore” sequel.

It was a time of vicious division, of bombings and executions and as “Land” begins, a dangerous place for women and children.

“With the Good Friday peace agreement we’ve had 25 years or so of relative peace,” Neeson, 71, reflected of starring in a film about the notorious Troubles.

“It’s interesting and kind of comforting to do a piece of entertainment which is what ‘In the Land of Saints and Sinners’ is, based on the Troubles that lasted for 30 years or so where there were over 3,000 people killed.”

Finbar is exceptional at his job. Considerate as well: He allows his victims to dig their own graves, then gives them a minute of contemplation before he shoots.

When he’s decided he’s finished, retired, he buys seeds for a flower garden.  He reads, appropriately enough, Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”  He’s a killer with feelings.

Was this Irish actor inspired by specific characters?

“No, he’s not based on anything I know. I’ve played various versions of Finbar over the past 15 years and it’s a comforting coat to wear where hopefully I can introduce a couple of other levels, rather than just an ex-hitman, killer. I like playing these sorts of characters.

“As it says on the poster, ‘Haunted by sin. Hunted by sinners.’”

The film’s a reunion with his “The Marksman” helmer Robert Lorenz. Is there an automatic comfort level he wouldn’t have with someone new?

“I love to work with Bob  — he’s from the Clint Eastwood School of Moviemaking: He does two, maybe three takes maximum. You keep up a certain pace shooting on the set.

“I love that kind of quick pace. You develop a shorthand language with each other. Bob gets me and I get him and we don’t over intellectualize any scenes or any moments. Just continue to get off the job.”

Neeson just celebrated a cinematic anniversary with his Oscar-nominated performance in the Oscar-winning Best Picture of 1993, “Schindler’s List.”

“I love ‘Schindler’s List.’ I was so honored to be a part of it because I can’t believe it’s 30 years ago.

“But ‘Michael Collins’ is still my favorite, just for personal reasons,” he said of the 1996 biopic of the 1920s IRA activist who lived and died for the cause of Irish independence.

“I have a great admiration for Collins for what he did. And also what he didn’t do.”

“In the Land of Saints and Sinners” opens March 29

In that case? April 5 is your day. As part of Cinema/Chicago’s calendar of events — the nonprofit that’s best known for the Chicago International Film Festival — director, screenwriter and producer Karyn Kusama will conduct a master class on what she has learned directing for television and film. The session’s title: “Directing for Television and Film.” Kusama shares that title’s forthright quality.

It took her several years of finance hustling to make her 2000 debut independent feature “Girlfight” starring Michelle Rodriguez. The “no”s Kusama encountered en route came with a wearying refrain: Make the aspiring boxer at the story’s center a white girl, not a Latina. She held out for Rodriguez, who took off from there.

Kusama made “Girlfight” for $1 million. Her second feature, the Charlize Theron futuristic assassin thriller “Aeon Flux,” cost 62 times that. Paramount Pictures didn’t love Kusama’s cut, which led to significant cuts, reshoots, changes and, because studio inference always knows best, a financial failure. Up and down; down and up. This is the way of most filmmaking careers, especially careers straddling independent work and the conglomerates.

I love a lot of Kusama’s films; one of my favorites, her 2015 indie “The Invitation” — another $1 million gem, shot in three weeks with 12 actors and one hillside LA house — works like sinister gangbusters. Without giving the premise away, it ends with a beautiful, ice-cold whammy reminiscent of the ’70s paranoia thrillers Kusama adores.

More recently, she has flourished in television, directing the initial episodes of Showtime’s “Yellowjackets,” which she executive produces. This summer she starts filming “The Terror” for AMC, a six-hour miniseries — directing two of the six episodes, executive producing the rest. Master classes such as the April 5 Chicago talk, part of Cinema/Chicago’s Chicago Industry Exchange series, provoke all kinds of questions from attendees, she says. Some gravitate toward the aspirational and idealistic, she says: “What is the art we want to be making? What is the art we want to be seeing?” Others spring from career doubts and the ability to buy groceries, i.e.: Can I make a living behind a camera?

Now 56, Kusama joined me on Zoom from the Los Feliz LA home she shares with frequent collaborator, screenwriter husband Phil Hay, and their son. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: You’ve done these sorts of master classes before. Is “How am I going to make a living?” the question that keeps coming up?

A: It’s the evergreen question, and it has a way of getting overlooked sometimes in relation to matters of personal vision and art-making. Finding a professional path we can actually survive on — how to make this industry and art form work for us, as professionals — that’s the question. And it’s become even more urgent these last couple of years.

I feel like I’ve learned so much in my 25 years in the business, but I’m struck at how it literally never stops changing. And so rapidly.  In my own work, I’m thinking a lot about provoking and encouraging an audience to cultivate a more thoughtful attention span. The attention span of viewers has radically shifted away from … paying attention (laughs). I mean, that’s just the noise of our particular world right now. But it’s an important mission: to get people to sit down and watch something with total engagement. That’s a high bar as a filmmaker to reach, and it’s a high bar for the viewer. I wish it were easier. But I’m open to the challenge of it.

Q: You directed the pilot episode of “Yellowjackets.” This was just before the pandemic?

A: We had our last day of editing the day before the national lockdown in March 2020. Right down to the wire. I remember thinking: Huh. I wonder how bad this virus might be? (With the pilot) we had to be mindful of a television audience required to make a lot of connections between a character we establish as played by a teenaged actor and then that character’s adult counterpart. There were so many things in that first episode we wanted to feel effortlessly connected, hopefully, for the audience. While staying engaging. That’s a constant mission for any filmmaker. Keeping questions about the story alive, while answering enough of them so that a viewer doesn’t feel lost.

Q: So: clear. And interesting.

A: Clear, but just clear enough. And engaging. That’s a tough balance to strike.

Q: It reminds me of your Trailers From Hell segment on “The Parallax View,” the 1974 Alan J. Pakula film. I’m a little older than you but we both saw that at a pretty young age —

A: I just saw a print of that here in LA at the Egyptian Theatre last week! It was so great to watch it on the big screen again. And to be reminded how mysterious that movie is. Inspiring, really. A true artifact of a great era in filmmaking.

Q: There’s a lot of small-screen production going on in Chicago, as you know. And there’s a lot of uncertainty and anxiety among folks graduating from film school here. Wherever you are, in Chicago, LA or New York — you came through NYU yourself, before working for filmmaker John Sayles — it’s not easy to make the next step. What do you tell students about that?

A: Well, let’s start with this: Chicago is one of the greatest cities in the world. If I could live anywhere other than LA or New York, it would be Chicago. So much about it is historically, architecturally and politically significant to me. I see it as a center of art-making. And I like to instill that sense of local pride (in young filmmakers) of where we come from, where we got our education, wherever we first truly interacted with art. There’s always so much interesting material in the place we come from. I grew up in St. Louis, which always wanted to be Chicago, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t turn out that way. Yet I appreciate everything I got out of living there.

I’ve talked to some of the film schools in Chicago, and I don’t lead with the idea that all the action’s in Los Angeles or New York because I don’t think that’s true. There’s a wealth of young talent gaining real skills in Chicago, different from the skills they might’ve gotten from film school in Los Angeles or New York. It’s a more intimate community, and a great place to make some lifelong connections. There are times with LA particularly where it just feels sprawling and impossible.

Q: Coming out of NYU, did New York’s compression or however you want to describe it — did it make things easier?

A: It can. But wherever you are, there’s the likelihood of doing a lot of the wrong kind of work for a while. I went along a path working on music videos, and industrial videos, which is good training. But I didn’t necessarily find my direction for a while. It helped to meet a filmmaker like John Sayles, who was such a mentor to me, and in many respects a bridge between the indie film world and the studio world, for which he wrote a lot of screenplays. I was really lucky my trajectory led me to him. It takes some time to find those people.

Q: When you talk to groups, based on how you watch movies yourself, is there any advice you feel is important to pass along to younger filmmakers about what to do, literally, with the camera? How to use it in a way that serves the material, and in ways that won’t feel like nobody in particular designed the shot? 

A: I think young filmmakers have to identify how they like to see, and what they respond to in the films they love. The films that make them feel something. There are films we may admire, or be impressed by, but for me, the goal in making movies is to make people feel something. I encourage young filmmakers to let a movie work its particular magic on them, and then revisit it in order to unearth what made the movie work, what kept you up at night. Some movies just disturb me so deeply, I want to get better control of it, in a way, and learn for myself how and why it works the way it does. And then you can start to look into technical choices, every element and detail of the filmmaking, the sound, the color, the movement, and of course, the performances. It all builds your emotional reality.

It’s not something you learn overnight. Or ever fully learn, period. Luckily.

Q: Let’s say I’m 23. I’m about to direct my first feature. I show up to your master class, and I’m looking for one good practical piece of advice. What is that advice?

A: Honestly? I’d tell you to make getting a good night’s sleep your mission in life. Every single night. I am now at an age where a single night of bad sleep throws me off for too long. And I can’t afford it anymore. Young people should get in the habit of great sleep hygiene. It makes or breaks your ability to think on set.

Q: That’s fantastic advice. I’m not making any movies, but I’ll try it.

A: It’s mom-of-a-teenager advice, I guess. Which I am. But I’ve come to believe it for myself.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Yet today she is virtually unknown – and Regina King decided to do something about that.

“Shirley,” streaming March 22 on Netflix, is the result of a years-long producing effort by the Oscar-winner who also stars as the determinedly optimistic Chisholm.

“This film was necessary,” King, 53, said in a Zoom interview, “because for the majority of our lives, whenever my sister and I (as my producing partner on this) would mention Shirley Chisholm or whenever her name would come up, people didn’t know who she was.

“They never even heard the name! That just seemed like a crime to us. We felt like Shirley is such a huge part of the fabric of America, the fabric of our political landscape, that it does not make any sense that people would not know her name.

“That was the initial reason for wanting to tell the story. As time went on, we started to learn more about who she was and it even more felt like this woman is a superhero.

“I get the opportunity to play a superhero and hopefully inspire others to want to move the way she moved in that political space.”

As a politician, Chisholm perhaps lacks the spotlight status of a lawyer or doctor who saves lives. But King wanted a detailed look at the woman behind the headlines.

“It was important to tell a story that humanizes her,” King explained.  “People can only see her in one light, a speaker or a debater. They don’t get to see the nuanced moments that show the humanity of a person that we only see in pictures, or a short video clip or the little Wikipedia entry with bullet points of their life.

“We watch these stories hoping to feel a connection to real life characters – and for that we lean into the human side of them.

“If you will,” she added, “this is a more quiet film and I do think learning those things are what keeps you in the story.”

Alongside the public moments “Shirley” reveals familial issues, the complexities of a marriage where she had the spotlight and she was giving orders, making decisions.

“These things are true. We really try our hardest to honor Shirley as much as possible. But part of honoring a person is to tell the complex version of who a person is and their life experience.”

“Shirley” streams on Netflix.  

Still, Mohan wants “Immaculate” to be an exploitation flick, and so it is an exploitation flick, which means he has adorned Lobel’s script in texture, atmosphere and viscera, taking the genre seriously while also applying an ironic wit. He skews toward modern horror filmmaking, but has the references and deep film knowledge to make “Immaculate” feel more like a long-lost video nasty dredged up out of an obscure archive.

Sweeney stars as Sister Cecilia, a doe-eyed and docile devotee from Detroit who has traveled to Italy at the behest of a Father Tedeschi (Álvaro Morte) to take her vows at a secluded convent where she will care for elderly nuns. Soon, shockingly, she’s exhibiting pregnancy symptoms, her womb thrumming with a whooshing heartbeat under a sonogram machine. Her spontaneous conception is seen as a miracle, the resurrection of God. She has no choice but to carry this pregnancy to term, surrounded by jealous novitiates, senile nuns, controlling male leadership and a secret sect of the sisterhood who wear crimson shrouds over their faces.

It’s something of a wonder to watch Sweeney as she undertakes Sister Cecilia’s journey, transforming from a meek naif into something unexpected and wild, her pious discipline falling away with every indignity. As this swift, 89-minute film builds to an absolutely feral climax, we do believe her, perhaps most of all in the film’s final, jaw-dropping moments, as she embodies a pure animal honesty.

While Sweeney tackles Cecilia’s journey, her longtime collaborator Mohan directs the ever-loving hell out of Lobel’s script, drenching every frame in color, light and shadow, sending cinematographer Elisha Christian’s camera swooping around the characters, into coffins and down dark hallways. There is an over-reliance on jump scares, which are only intermittently effective, because, as audience members, we’re trained to expect them, and tire easily if they don’t pay off. However, these fade to the background as the film evolves into more effectively suspenseful filmmaking as Mohan operationalizes darkness and light to intriguing ends.

It’s goopy, gross fun, if not entirely terrifying, and if there’s a weak link, it’s the screenplay, which toys with deeper social and sexual themes but skims along the surface and leaves loose ends unfinished. While it can be refreshing when a writer doesn’t over-explain (or tie everything back to trauma), there are a few plot threads that could have been pulled taut for a more satisfying narrative.

Still, if some of the mysterious elements exist merely to add mood and tone, it’s worth it. If certain aspects of the convent’s culture go unexplored, it’s because Sister Cecilia hasn’t the time or the language skills to figure it out, and Mohan keeps us locked into her perspective and subjective experience of this place as an outsider. This strange cult is as mysterious to us as it is to her, as it would be in any good folk horror film.

All these references, which include, but are not limited to: giallo, Hammer horror, Frankenstein, “The Omen,” “The Wicker Man” (and even a shade of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”), ultimately coalesce during the bravura climax, which flips the script on “Rosemary’s Baby,” allowing for a kind of inevitable agency that finally drags “Immaculate” into a truly modern conception. In that moment, any and all qualms fall away as the only appropriate reaction can be: “bravo.”

(“Immaculate” contains strong and bloody violent content, grisly images, nudity and some language)

Tribune News Service

‘IMMACULATE’

Rated R. At the Landmark Kendall Square, AMC Boston Common, AMC South Bay Center, AMC Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, and suburban theaters

Grade: A-

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” is the follow-up to the largely enjoyable 2021 adventure “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” The latter, which saw Jason Reitman — son of Ivan Reitman, director of 1984’s original “Ghostbusters” and its 1989 sequel, “Ghostbusters II” — at the helm, introduced a new generation of brave spirit-catching souls while also bringing back key legacy characters.

Well, the “Ghostbusters” franchise obviously isn’t ready to let go of the past.

“Frozen Empire” — co-written, like its predecessor, by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, who takes over directing duties this time — is similarly packed with multiple generations of Ghostbusters. As a result, it doesn’t feel as fresh as “Afterlife.”

Nonetheless, it’s again a pretty entertaining way to spend a couple of hours.

Following a prologue set in 1904 New York City in which a few frozen folks literally fall to pieces, we move to the modern Big Apple and catch up with the family at the heart of the new movie, descendants of deceased original Ghostbuster Egon Spengler. Mom Callie (Carrie Coon), son Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) and daughter Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) are out on the hunt, packed into the vehicle synonymous with the Ghostbusters, Ecto-1, being driven by Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), who’s graduated from being Phoebe’s teacher to her, um, “step-teacher,” as he awkwardly puts it.

Bankrolled by Ghostbuster-turned-philanthropist Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson), the family now resides in the Ghostbusters’ old Tribeca firehouse, traveling by pole from where they sleep to the other levels of the aged building.

Another hero is, again, Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz, the former Ghostbuster now spending his time buying old objects he eagerly scans with his PKE reader for paranormal energy and hosts an online show with the help of Podcast (Logan Kim), who has migrated to New York from Oklahoma along with the Spenglers, as has Lucky (Celeste O’Connor), Trevor’s friend.

We also get — and no complaints here — Bill Murray’s original Ghostbuster Peter Venkman popping in for a few meaningful minutes of screentime.

Expect another familiar face or two, while newcomers include Patton Oswalt’s Dr. Hubert Wartzki, an expert in ghostly and ghastly folklore, and James Acaster’s Lars, a scientist working with Winston’s new Paranormal Research Center. (Making his film debut, Acaster is a very creative comedian who earns a few lab-related laughs.)

The more important new characters, however, are Melody (Emily Alyn Lind of “Gossip Girl”), a ghost trapped in this world who befriends Phoebe, and Nadeem (Kumail Nanjiani), a neighborhood hustler who must embrace his destiny as “the firemaster” if humanity is to survive a coming threat.

That danger is Garraka, a terrifying demon with the power of “the death chill” who has been trapped in an ancient artifact for more than a century.

With so many characters to juggle and seemingly determined to give us a reasonable runtime, Reitman and Kenan don’t even try to give many of them arcs. The major exception is Phoebe, who’s benched after the fact that she’s only 15 becomes an issue for New York’s mayor, who’s not exactly a longtime ally of the Ghostbusters.

The most fun is provided by Nanjiani, the star of “The Big Sick” and “The Lovebirds” sticking some comedic lines as only he can as the increasingly important Nadeem.

Overall, even as “Frozen Empire” is essentially going through the ghostbusting motions, it is consistently pleasant thanks to its appealing cast. For example, Rudd (“Ant-Man”) is his usual brand of everyman-charming as Gary, who is asked by girlfriend Callie to start being more of a dad to her kids, which will mean being the bad guy sometimes.

Tastes surely vary on this kind of thing, but we’re pleased that, after building up the threat of Garraka, “Frozen Empire” doesn’t devolve into a seemingly endless supernatural battle sequence — like certain “Ghostbusters” installments we could name. Fear not, for there are ice spikes and proton packs aplenty in the climax, but we all know how this affair is going to end, so there’s no need to drag it out.

Counting the disappointing 2016 reboot, “Ghostbusters,” “Frozen Empire” — appropriately dedicated to Ivan Reitman, who died a few months after the release of “Afterlife” — is the fifth film in the franchise, and we’re guessing a sixth isn’t too far off in the distance.

We wouldn’t mind that, but maybe don’t invite quite so many folks to that paranormal party.

‘Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’

Rated PG-13. At the Landmark Kendal Square, AMC Boston Common, South Bay Center, Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport and suburban theaters.

Grade: B

King Kong teams up with Godzilla. The enduring “Apes” franchise continues with “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.” And Dev Patel dons a gorilla mask to step into a bloody fight club ring in Mumbai.

Not so much into primate-related cinema? No worries.

If that’s just way too sexy for ya, there’s the certain-to-be-a-crowd-pleaser “The Fall Guy,” with the unstoppable, unbeatable and just too darn handsome for words Ryan Gosling as a stuntman searching for a missing actor.

So, yeah, if you’re wondering what’s coming to theaters before the summer popcorn season arrives in mid-May, there is quite an assortment in the offing: dramas, comedies, tragedies, thrillers and even some more demonic stuff going down in Rome (“The First Omen,” April 5),

We studied the spring movie calendar (from now through May 10) and picked 10 movies (a couple we’ve seen in advance) that we think will be worth a trip to movie theaters to gorge ourselves on overpriced popcorn and top-rate entertainment, not necessarily in that order.

Here’s our roundup (arranged in no particular order). Note that release dates are subject to change.

“The Fall Guy”: Hollywood never tires of tinkering around with beloved — OK, even terrible — TV series by turning them into mostly forgettable movies. There have been a handful of good ones (“21 Jump Street,” the “Star Trek” films and “The Fugitive”), but more than a share of duds (“Starsky & Hutch,” “The Flintstones,” “S.W.A.T.”) and some utter clunkers (“Wild Wild West,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “The Dukes of Hazzard”). So where does “The Fall Guy” fall? The good news is it looks like a winner. Uber-athletic filmmaker David Leitch’s redo of that kitschy ‘80s series starring Lee Majors as a stuntman/bounty hunter earned raves in its South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) premiere earlier this month. A big reason why is its dreamy star Ryan Gosling, following up on his Oscar-nominated turn as Ken in “Barbie,” who struts his stuff as stuntman Colt Seavers. In this romance-laced blockbuster, Colt’s on the hunt for an action star (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who’s gone missing while shooting a film directed by Colt’s ex-girlfriend (Emily Blunt). Anyone who watched the Oscars on March 10 know that Gosling and Blunt have real chemistry together. Just take our money now. Opening: May 3.

“Challengers”: Oh, the games pro athletes play — on the field (or court, in this case) and in their bedrooms. In this steamy threesome drama helmed by Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name”), Tashi, a former star player turned coach (Oakland native Zendaya) seeks to up the slumping game of her top-ranking client (Mike Faist, of “West Side Story”) who’s also her hubby. Trouble and temptation knock on their door in the strapping form of her hubby’s former bestie, who also happens to be Tashi’s ex-lover (Josh O’Connor of “Emma”). He happens to also be the on-court competition, leading to tangled emotions, ambitions and probably ethics. “Challengers” looks to be Zendaya’s bid for another winning title, and the versatile performer keeps on pushing herself and impressing critics and audience alike. She lands her biggest lead role in a theatrical release yet, and we think she’s more than up for the challenge. Opening: April 26.

“Civil War”: With a contentious presidential election advancing from the backburner to the disturbing forefront, Alex Garland’s “what-if” film proposes a sickeningly believable scenario, that our nation becomes so entrenched and divided and outraged that a civil war breaks out. As a filmmaker, Garland likes to engulf you, rattle you, then spit you out (the last 10 minutes of his “Men” made everyone squirm. EVERYONE). Here, Garland assembles an A-list cast that includes Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny and Nick Offerman for a nailbiter that follows journalists as they risk all to cover a volatile story about angry, heavily armed Americans squaring off with a totalitarian government. Call it the ultimate American Horror Story. Opening: April 12.

“Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire”: Coming hot off a first-ever Oscar win, that workaholic Godzilla is already back on the job, teaming up with that massive, cranky ape King Kong for Legendary Pictures’ latest MonsterVerse smackdown. But can returning helmer Adam Wingard’s focus on the historical legacy of these Titans and that monster haven Skull Island rival anything we witnessed in the Oscar-winning (for best special effects) 2023 extravaganza “Godzilla Minus One?” We have doubts, but that won’t stop us from seeing this effort starring Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry and Dan Stevens. Opening: March 29.

“Wicked Little Letters”: A serial letter writer spews LOL profanities and hurls spurious accusations at residents of a quaint 1920s English village. The anonymous extracurricular activity creates a ruckus and leads to pious fingers pointing directly at Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), an Irish migrant and raucous single mom who does indeed curse like a proverbial sailor. In stage director Thea Sharrock’s truth-based dark comedy, feisty Rose tangles with her nosy, buttoned-up, pursed-lipped neighbor Edith (Olivia Colman) while a smart female investigator (Anjana Vasan) runs smack into sexism wherever she turns. “Wicked Little Letters” might well be that pleasing antidote to make you laugh during these troubled times. The creative use of naughty words deployed in those scandalous letters sure had me cackling. Opening: April 5.

“Femme”: Two of the finest performances of 2024 power Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping’s provocative, unique queer revenge drama/thriller. When Black drag performer Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) runs into homophobe Preston (George MacKay of “1917”), who’s the tatted, tightly wound brute that violently gay-bashed him, a vengeance plan takes root. But as Jules enters Preston’s life, the power dynamic begins to shift in unexpected, dangerous ways. “Femme” never allows you to take one breath of air — one reason why this is the find of the indie spring season  The two performances gut you. Opening: In limited release April 5 in Bay Area theaters.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”: Director Wes Ball had his work cut out for him, following in the ape prints of 2010’s sensational trilogy (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes” and the exceptional “War for the Planet of the Apes”). But the filmmaker behind “The Maze Runner” trilogy gives the film and the franchise his best shot by leaping over generations to a new time where apes rule and humans acquiesce. When a power-drunk ape goes bananas and starts acting more and more like a dictator, a young ape emerges on the scene. Opening: May 10.

“I Saw the TV Glow”: A film that defies genre identification often turns out to be a head trip. And that pretty much sums up this Sundance Film Festival breakout, which received an enthusiastic response there and continues to draw sizable buzz. Jane Schoenbrun (“All Going to the World’s Fair”) takes us to the mid-1990s, where an isolated teen develops an intense connection with an eerie late-night TV show. Justice Smith, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Ian Foreman and Helena Howard star. We’ll certainly be tuning in. Opening: May 3 in select cities; May 12 nationally.

“The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”: To try and figure what the heck Guy Ritchie’s comedic adventure is about, all you need to do is digest the title of the book that inspired the mayhem: Damien Lewis’s “Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story of the Special Forces Desperadoes of WWII.” That gives you the nuts-and-bolts of this “truth-based” exercise that stars a flotilla of hunks (Henry Cavill, Alan Ritchson, Alex Pettyfer, Hero Fiennes Tiffin, Henry Golding and so on). Let’s just hope Ritchie channels more of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” (even if it bombed at the box office) and less of “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” (which made oodles.) Opening: April 19.

“Monkey Man”: We’ve always loved Dev Patel the actor, and now we can extend that adoration to his skills as a filmmaker, co-screenwriter and producer, at least based on the word out of SXSW, where his directorial debut premiered. The violent fight club-adjacent thriller stars Patel as Kid and is set in Mumbai. Patel, who reportedly incurred numerous injuries during the film’s fight sequences, plays a gorilla-masked fighter who directs his rage not only at his ring competitors but also those who have kept him down for the count. The fight sequences are supposedly phenomenal. Opening: April 5.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

Right now, fans of sci-fi/fantasy films are going ga-ga over “Dune: Part 2” (which certainly is gorgeous).

But I’m here to sing the praises of another space opera.

I was a bit late jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon. (Spoiler: Darth Vader dies; who knew?) Sure, I couldn’t escape seeing the first two — er, Episodes 4 and 5, I mean — in theaters when they first came out back in 1977 and 1980. But really, I had little interest, didn’t know what it all meant and couldn’t appreciate how incredible it was that George Lucas created this fantastical dynasty.

Then, a couple of years ago, I met Dave, a sci-fi/fantasy geek who convinced me to give the genre a try.

After dipping my toe into the outer space pool with “The Expanse” series (2015-2021), and a lot of hitting pause and asking questions (“So where did this menacing blue goo come from again?”), I was ready to take the plunge.

We began with “Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope,” released in 1977. (Naturally, we watched them in the order they were made, like any purist would.) Little of it was familiar to me, so I was enthralled. And the best part of it all: I got explanations along the way, i.e., “Lucas based his air battles between the empire and the rebels on World War II dogfighting newsreels.”

“The trilogies are about the redemption of evil men becoming good again, against the backdrop of John Williams’ brilliant scores.”

“The Midi-chlorians (the foundational cells of the Force) were strong in the Skywalkers, and Anakin’s lightsaber tied Luke and Rey together through the Force.”

Wookies and jawas and banthas, oh my.

My pop culture memory banks are so much more complete now that I know the difference between a clone and a droid, and can identify a rancor and a dewback. Oh, what I have missed!

“The stormtroopers were named after the Sturm Abteilung of the Nazi party.”

“Just like his grandfather, Kylo Ren is manipulated by a Sith and wants to embrace the power of the Dark Side but he struggles against the pull of the Light Side from his Skywalker heritage.”

But all good things come to an end, amiright? After Star Wars episodes IV, V and VI, and then I, II and III, I was feeling bereft — until Dave showed me all of the Star Wars spinoffs: “Ahsoka,” “The Book of Boba Fett,” “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” It was so exciting that I burst into song: “A whole new worrrrrrrrld.” So much to look forward to.

At a recent book club meeting, I excitedly described my most recent obsession to my friends: “The Mandalorian” series, a Star Wars spinoff streaming on Disney, starring a mostly-masked Pedro Pascal and the cutest little puppet/CGI creature, Grogu.

When I told these worldly, intelligent women that I wanted to buy Baby Yoda figurines and place them all over my house, the look on their faces made me wonder if I had gone too far.

But I remain unapologetic. They’ll see how cute those little Baby Yodas are when they come over for our June meeting.

However, I think they would judge me if they knew about the Grogu adhesive bandages in my medicine cabinet.

Jedi and beskar and Leia, oh my.

May the force … you know.

Move over Messi — there’s a new canine thespian in town. Ukai, the Australian shepherd/border collie/bouvier mix who stars opposite Mark Wahlberg in the new film “Arthur the King,” undertakes a performance that is more physically rigorous, if not dramatically suspenseful, than the one delivered by the French border collie who appeared in the Oscar-winning film “Anatomy of a Fall.”

But dog movies, and dogs in movies, aren’t just having a moment, they’ve been an important part of cinema since the silent era — and an easy hack to access audience’s heartstrings.

Not that Arthur’s tale needed much hacking to start with. This inspirational film is based on a true story, originally a quirky human interest sports news item about an Ecuadorian stray dog who bonded with a team of Swedish adventure racers in the middle of a grueling six-day trek, following them to the finish line, and eventually back to Sweden with racer Mikael Lindnord. The story became a media sensation, spawning a memoir and several other books by Lindnord, and a short ESPN documentary, as well as a dog rescue foundation.

Lindnord’s memoir “Arthur: The Dog who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home” serves as the basis for “Arthur the King,” adapted by screenwriter Michael Brandt and directed by Simon Cellan Jones, who also directed star Mark Wahlberg in “The Family Plan.”

This story of perseverance, suffering and salvation though physical challenges is right in Wahlberg’s current wheelhouse. The star is a deeply devout Catholic, devoted to a prayer and exercise routine that regularly starts around 3 a.m. His 2022 film “Father Stu,” in which he plays a Catholic priest who survives a motorcycle accident and is left disabled by a degenerative muscle disease, features a story of spiritual salvation through physical suffering that’s a darker side of the themes in “Arthur the King.” Nevertheless, the amount of time his character, Michael Light, extols the virtues of pain and suffering while racing in the film is a clue that this is the kind of material that Wahlberg thrills to.

Transposing the setting from Sweden to Colorado, and the race from Ecuador to the Dominican Republic (where the film was shot on location), Wahlberg stars as a washed-up adventure racer who has struggled in the past with being a team player. With one last chance to prove himself, he puts together a team for the adventure racing world championships, including an old rival, Chik (Ali Suliman), a new superstar, Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel), and an estranged teammate turned influencer, Leo (Simu Liu). Together they’ll have to run, hike, bike, climb and kayak their way over hundreds of miles of rough terrain over the course of several days to the finish line.

Intercut with the race prep is the plight of a Santo Domingo stray pup who is starved and wounded living on the streets. When Michael tosses him a meatball during a rest at a race transition, the dog starts following the team through jungle downpours, river crossings and ocean paddles, serving as both motivator and mascot. He even has his own “Lassie” moments, communicating danger to the team along the way. They dub him Arthur for his stoic, regal demeanor.

It’s fairly standard, and often treacly heartwarming dog fare, calling to mind other adventurous pups in TV and film, like the aforementioned Lassie, Benji and Rin Tin Tin, but edged up with an adventure sports milieu and vibrant, handheld cinematography by Jacques Jouffret that gives the film a more adult, action-oriented look and feel (there is one CGI shot of Arthur that should have been reconsidered given the film’s grittier aesthetic).

Suffering may be Wahlberg’s raison d’etre, but this is a lighter and more uplifting mode for the actor, who clearly enjoys the extreme physicality of the performance, even if the emotional tenor is well within his established star persona. And if you’re a dog person, it will be impossible to resist the tale of Arthur and his knights of extreme sports.

———

‘ARTHUR THE KING’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some strong language)

Running time: 1:47

How to watch: in theaters Friday

———

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Opening night: The East Coast premiere of “Immaculate” with Sydney Sweeney (“Euphoria,” “White Lotus 1”).

“It’s a dark, fun film with some thought behind it, very much in the realm of ‘Black Narcissus,’ the Michael Powell film,” explained festival programmer Nicole McControversy of the 1947 classic about nuns going mad in the Himalayas.

“We get to see Sydney explore her range as a performer as a young novitiate about to become a nun who goes to this idyllic place in Italy. She thinks she’s found her sisters and God. But dark stuff is at play.”

For McControversy, at BUFF since 2008, each festival takes, “A look at what’s going on in the world of horror. Usually it’s dystopian anxieties, communal strife.”

“Boy Kills World,” another East Coast premiere, stars Bill Skarsgård (“It,” “John Wick: Chapter Four”) as a deaf man with a mission. “That is one very wild out-there action movie. We get to see Bill and his fighting chops. The choreography is brilliant!

“It’s got a ‘Kill Bill’ framework, a vengeance story.  He’s training in forests with a shaman and the film follows his journey.”

From Canada comes the slasher film “In a Violent Nature,” one of McControversy’s favorites. “That film in particular takes a familiar format, a slasher film you’ve seen from the ‘80s, and does something very different. It puts us in the perspective of the slasher. There’s a lot of moments where you’re standing in his body in the woods watching teenage shenanigans play out. And then,” she laughed, “he goes and kills them.  It really pulls apart the things that make a slasher film.”

BUFF’s film slate, said Kevin Monahan, its artistic director since 2005, isn’t meant to be so underground it’s a fringe event.

“When I first started doing this, I wanted to put a hand grenade in people’s faces,” he said of equating shock with artistic integrity. “But I’ve matured a lot. While we always feel the need to provoke, we don’t go after it. It happens organically because of the films.

“One film I’d like to direct people to is ‘Strange Kindness,’ which rates as a world premiere Thursday. It’s a quiet, low burn character-driven piece that was shot in Cape Cod. So the filmmakers are local as is the talent — and we’d love the community to come out specifically for this.”

Currently the only way to see “Strange Kindness” is at BUFF — they have no distributor yet.

“The hope,” said McControversy, “is the industry will take notice. The dream is that it would be picked up.”

The 24th Boston Underground Film Festival runs at the Brattle from March 20 – 24. Individual tickets are $15, a BUFF badge for every entry is $150.

“I liked how relevant, how simple the idea was where anyone can put themselves in that position or place: Imagining that you were on a plane that went down in a reserve for big game?

“That alone is terrifying,” Phillippe (pronounced Fill-a-pea), 49, said in a Zoom interview earlier this week. “I’ve always liked survival movies and ‘Prey’ really strips a human being down to their bare essence in some regards.”

Phillipe has come to Africa’s Kalahari region to support his Christian missionary wife (Mena Suvari). Warned that a Boko Haram-style terrorist group plans to kidnap them, the couple flee in Emile Hirsch’s single engine plane which all too soon crashes in a restricted game reserve. How long can they survive, without weapons or even flares?

“There is a slight theological thread through this, of questioning God. Wondering why things happen to certain people,” Phillippe said. “They’re just good people trying to do a good thing in Africa in these villages and help others. Then something like this befalls them.

“It makes them question. ‘What’s going on here? Is it worth being good? Who’s looking out for me?’ These aspects — Man’s search for meaning or search for God — really appealed to me.”

Because the couple are suddenly reduced to the elemental question of, ‘Will I live or die?’ the two actors “had discussions along with the director Mukunda (Michael Dweil) about what our backstory might have been.

“She’s the missionary, my character’s a doctor. I think that at some point in my character’s life, he was on a bad path. And once he met her, she turned his life around, maybe made him a more spiritual man.

“Being a missionary in this part of the world was at her instigation; he went along with it because of the effect she’s had on his life.

“Throughout this movie, certainly in terms of Mena’s character, there’s also the thread of the idea of sacrifice.”

As sun sets and lions come out to feed, “He’s testing God in some regards, seeing what will play out. As a doctor whose whole aim is to save lives, we see in the beginning that he’s lost a child because he doesn’t have the proper medical supplies.

“He says, ‘I could have saved that kid if I just had a little plastic stent.’ Then other (not-good) things have happened. So he sits under a tree and says, ‘I’m done. I’m going to sit here and whatever happens happens.’”

“Prey” is available on VOD

“I hadn’t seen her art until I was a freshman in college,” says Gutierrez, a film editor who makes her directorial debut with the new documentary “Frida.” “Then I found one piece, one painting in a book in the library.

“It was of her standing between the United States and Mexico,” she says. “You can see her full body – we actually use that painting in the film. And I was a pretty new immigrant. I had been in the States for, I think, two to three years.

“I really saw my experience reflected there,” she says. “A little bit of hesitation about my new surroundings and really missing home.

“So I feel like the story for me, it started back then,” says Gutierrez, who also co-edits the film, a role she’s previously done on such documentaries as “RBG” about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and “Julia,” about chef Julia Child. “When I came back to her story at 47 years old, I was actually the same age [she was when she died] when I started looking into her story. Which was kind of shocking to me.”

By then, Gutierrez had explored beyond Kahlo’s 1932 oil painting “Self-Portrait on the Borderline Between Mexico and the United States” that had originally inspired her.

“I spent a couple of decades or more, really connecting to some of her paintings,” she says. “Really following her life very closely.

“Then I went back to the material that had I read back then, and I realized that her voice existed in writing from a lot of different sources,” Gutierrez says. “The books that I was reading at that time just kind of showed me that a story about her could be told through her voice, some of it.”

“Frida,” a colorful, creative portrait of the artist told and illustrated in her own words and brush strokes, is streaming now on Prime Video.

Searching for Frida

Gutierrez says from the start she wanted to avoid the contemporary talking heads that populate many documentaries on historical figures.

“We never wanted to do interviews, or kind of look at her life from that historical perspective in the sense of art historians or artists who had been inspired by her,” she says. “We wanted for the film to feel as present and as much of her as possible.

“So that’s how it started, with this idea that we could offer an intimacy into her life that had maybe not been shown on film,” Gutierrez continues. “Like really, truly focusing on her words and her voice as much as we could.

“And then it surprised us that by leaning into mostly her emotions, and not necessarily a factual list of what happened in her life, she really took over,” she says. “We just started being guided by her writings as much as we could.”

While Kahlo’s fame as both artist and icon didn’t fully blossom until years after her death, the filmmakers were fortunate that she was nonetheless a well-known and well-documented figure throughout her life. Born in 1907 in a village on the edge of Mexico City, her father, a professional photographer, documented her childhood and young adulthood through the lens of his camera.

After her marriage to the Mexican artist Diego Rivera in 1929, she traveled with him extensively in Europe and the United States, where his fame and her striking looks and style made her a favorite of journalists and photographers.

For Gutierrez, the detective work the film required to track down both visuals and words for the film was a delight.

“The research that went into collecting all of her writings was really intense,” she says. “We not only collected all her writings, but we also did a lot of research on contextual material. We tried to gather every interview from people that knew her that we could find. And the research took us into some interesting places.”

Biographer Hayden Herrera, who wrote the seminal 1983 biography on Kahlo was an obvious choice for Gutierrez and her researchers. Her papers had been donated to the Smithsonian, Gutierrez says, but on going there they discovered that none of the material for “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo,” including scores of interviews with people who knew Kahlo, was there.

“So then we very nicely asked if we could visit her house in Cape Cod,” Gutierrez says. “She’s about 85 years old. And we went up to her attic, and we cleaned her attic, and we found these enormous boxes with all the original research that she did on that book.”

Letters Kahlo sent her San Francisco doctor, who became a close friend, were tracked down in the Oaxaca Museum of Art, she says. Letters she wrote to her mother were located in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C.

“There was a couple called the Crommies, who are in San Francisco, who made a film about Frida,” Gutierrez says of the 1966 short documentary “The Life and Death of Frida Kahlo as Told to Karen and David Crommie.” “They did a lot of interviews with people, like with the nurse that took care of Frida in the last years of her life.

“When I went to their house, they brought up a box full of quarter-inch tapes that hadn’t seen the light of day for 50 years,” she says. “We just lifted up every potential rock out there to find as much as we could.”

An intimate voice

Gutierrez says she started the project well aware of the outward facts of Kahlo’s life. Making the film, and focusing on Frida’s own words, most of which she never expected would be read by those outside her intimate circles, allowed Gutierrez to enter the heart and mind of the artist.

“I knew the facts of her life really well because of the books that I had read,” she says. “Really listening to the texture of her personality was special. That was really new and refreshing to get to know her in a new way, through her own words.

“Like, I knew about her feelings on America, and I knew some of her feelings of Paris intellectuals. But to be able to read everything that she had said about them, and the sharp language that she used was really special.”

That unfiltered voice, at different times funny, poignant or salty, adds greatly to the narration of Kahlo’s words delivered in the Spanish or English in which they were written.

“There were two letters, one written in Spanish, and the other one written in English, with a lot of flowery language about Parisian intellectuals,” Gutierrez says. “That the only thing they do is talk and talk and talk among themselves in cafes and parties. I don’t think she ever got tired of insulting them.

“So really, (we found) the intimacy of her voice itself, but also kind of the messiness of her feelings, and the messiness of being able to really read about her fragility and her fears,” she says. “For example, in the scene about her miscarriage, her letters talking about, or questioning, what decision she is going to make.

“Really, the tenderness of a woman just dealing with regular, but really heavy and important things in her life was really special.”

Art and movement

Beyond the choice to use Kahlo’s own words as the main narration of the film, Gutierrez’s second big decision was to animate some of Kahlo’s art, adding motion to paintings and sketches that had been static works of art on museum walls or artbook pages.

“It was a bold decision,” Gutierrez says. “It could be seen as a controversial decision to touch Frida’s art. But it was a decision I made at the very beginning because I knew that we were working in this cinematic universe. And we were thinking from the very beginning, you know, Frida’s paintings kind of carry her mind and carry her heart, so how do we immerse our audience in this kind of cinematic space into that internal world?

“I really wanted for the film to be able to highlight the emotions that we wanted to underline in the art,” she says. “As we’re talking about moments in her life that made art possible. It was essential for the film to make that really strong connection. What had her lived experiences brought to her art?”

Gutierrez, who was born and raised in Peru before immigrating to the United States, felt comfortable working with the culture of Latin America, but she wanted to find as many Mexican collaborators as possible, given Kahlo’s roots there, and ended up with a mostly Mexican, mostly female team of animators on the film.

She says none of the animations used in the film added elements to the artwork Kahlo had created. Instead, elements already in the paintings now move to underscore the words they accompany.

“For example, where you see the painting of her cutting her hair,” Gutierrez says. “You know it’s coming from a place where she actually felt a lot of self-hate for being in the situation. She didn’t love herself that much. There was desperation. There was a lot of hate. There was a lot of anger.

“So I wanted the movement that we created with the painting to really capture that,” she says. “Then you end up with a painting that really carries all of that anxiety and anger and, you know, desperation that she was living in that moment. So that was the decision.”

For nearly two decades, she anchored the underfunded soap opera “Crossroads,” which was set in and around a motel in the British Midlands. A running joke has one person or another pointing out how odd this premise is, considering there are no motels in England (not in the American sense of the word, anyway). The show ran from 1964 to 1988 and everything about it is a bit camp in hindsight, from the cardboard-looking sets to the stiff acting to the shabby, faded color palette. This homage — to both the show and the way Gordon carried it on her back — is from Russell T. Davies (best known for the “Doctor Who” revival) and it has a winking spirit, while also being a moving portrait of Nolly herself.

Compared to old clips that are floating around, there’s slightly more of an edge to Carter’s interpretation. The real Nolly had softer features, whereas Carter has the kind of high cheekbones that can slice through a scene. This gives her a slightly different vibe overall, but it’s a minor point. The performance is funny and affecting, and it works like gangbusters.

Nolly may be a handful, but she’s no phony and she cares a great deal about the people she works with and the job at hand. But she can be exasperating and Davies captures this with a sly sense of humor. When a new actor joins the show, Nolly objects to her regional accent. Nolly thinks everyone should be using the more pristine-sounding received pronunciation, aka RP.

But the character had a rough upbringing, someone explains.

Nolly is having none of it: “I was practically brought up single-handed. My mother worked night and day, god bless her soul, and I haven’t got a hint of Scottish Presbyterian, not a spec, not a vowel, not a single glottal stop.” Carter’s emphasis on “glottal” is a thing of perfection.

But Nolly isn’t done. She turns to her best friend and co-star Tony Adams, played by Augustus Prew: Look at Adams, she says. “Brought up on a fishing boat. His mother had an affair with the deputy manager of a coal mine.”

“She said I was conceived in a boathouse on a coil of rope!” he adds.

“And yet he ended up cut glass,” Nolly says and turns back to the new actress: “Can you do RP? Are you trained? What do you think? Can you do it?” It doesn’t matter what the show’s director (Con O’Neill) wants. As far as Nolly is concerned, she knows best. “I am making this show better if I have to haul it out of the grave line by line.” She’s been at this long enough that her instincts are probably right more often than not.

Nolly and her co-stars (who adore her and see her as a maternal figure) are as swept up in the suspense about her on-screen fate as audiences presumably were. But the process is humiliating and heartbreaking, as she reaps some of what she has sown. “I’m just an old soap star who has been sacked,” she tells her sympathetic old friend and fellow actor Larry Grayson (Mark Gatiss). They sigh and decide they’re just “two old stars bellowing into the night,” and it’s such a wonderfully poignant moment. She will reinvent herself with a career on stage, to some middle-range success. And there’s a lovely coda that allows her to close out her relationship with “Crossroads” on better terms.

For U.S. viewers, Carter’s performance has the benefit of not competing with a memory. But according to Davies, “A lot of people in Britain haven’t heard of her” either. That’s the undercurrent here. Fame is fleeting. Time passes and you’re relegated to obscurity, no matter how indelible you once were. As streaming has replaced reruns, our collective pop cultural literacy has taken a hit. We’ve become increasingly siloed off from the past, losing all those wonderfully passive opportunities that once meant it was easy to stumble across decades-old ephemera.

This shift means a project like “Nolly” can not rely on familiarity and shortcuts to see it through. It has to work even if you have no frame of reference — no knowledge of this prima donna or soaps from the era. And yet it is so well written, so well cast and executed, it finds a way to thrillingly reanimate a slice of British pop culture history from the analog era. It may be a romanticized look back, but it’s an endearing and meaningful one all the same.

“Nolly” — 3 stars (out of 4)

Where to watch: 8 p.m. Sunday on Masterpiece on PBS

Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.

But dog movies, and dogs in movies, aren’t just having a moment, they’ve been an important part of cinema since the silent era — and an easy hack to access audience’s heartstrings.

Not that Arthur’s tale needed much hacking to start with. This inspirational film is based on a true story, originally a quirky human interest sports news item about an Ecuadorian stray dog who bonded with a team of Swedish adventure racers in the middle of a grueling six-day trek, following them to the finish line, and eventually back to Sweden with racer Mikael Lindnord. The story became a media sensation, spawning a memoir and several other books by Lindnord, and a short ESPN documentary, as well as a dog rescue foundation.

Lindnord’s memoir “Arthur: The Dog who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home” serves as the basis for “Arthur the King,” adapted by screenwriter Michael Brandt and directed by Simon Cellan Jones, who also directed star Mark Wahlberg in “The Family Plan.”

This story of perseverance, suffering and salvation though physical challenges is right in Wahlberg’s current wheelhouse. The star is a deeply devout Catholic, devoted to a prayer and exercise routine that regularly starts around 3 a.m. His 2022 film “Father Stu,” in which he plays a Catholic priest who survives a motorcycle accident and is left disabled by a degenerative muscle disease, features a story of spiritual salvation through physical suffering that’s a darker side of the themes in “Arthur the King.” Nevertheless, the amount of time his character, Michael Light, extols the virtues of pain and suffering while racing in the film is a clue that this is the kind of material that Wahlberg thrills to.

Transposing the setting from Sweden to Colorado, and the race from Ecuador to the Dominican Republic (where the film was shot on location), Wahlberg stars as a washed-up adventure racer who has struggled in the past with being a team player. With one last chance to prove himself, he puts together a team for the adventure racing world championships, including an old rival, Chik (Ali Suliman), a new superstar, Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel), and an estranged teammate turned influencer, Leo (Simu Liu). Together they’ll have to run, hike, bike, climb and kayak their way over hundreds of miles of rough terrain over the course of several days to the finish line.

Intercut with the race prep is the plight of a Santo Domingo stray pup who is starved and wounded living on the streets. When Michael tosses him a meatball during a rest at a race transition, the dog starts following the team through jungle downpours, river crossings and ocean paddles, serving as both motivator and mascot. He even has his own “Lassie” moments, communicating danger to the team along the way. They dub him Arthur for his stoic, regal demeanor.

It’s fairly standard, and often treacly heartwarming dog fare, calling to mind other adventurous pups in TV and film, like the aforementioned Lassie, Benji and Rin Tin Tin, but edged up with an adventure sports milieu and vibrant, handheld cinematography by Jacques Jouffret that gives the film a more adult, action-oriented look and feel (there is one CGI shot of Arthur that should have been reconsidered given the film’s grittier aesthetic).

Suffering may be Wahlberg’s raison d’etre, but this is a lighter and more uplifting mode for the actor, who clearly enjoys the extreme physicality of the performance, even if the emotional tenor is well within his established star persona. And if you’re a dog person, it will be impossible to resist the tale of Arthur and his knights of extreme sports.

“Arthur the King”

Rated PG-13. At the AMC Boston Common, South Bay Center, Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, and suburban theaters

Grade: B