内容摘要：Luciane Mengual, 22, an Indigenous woman from the Wayuu community, poses with her baby at home in the Villa del Sur neighborhood, on the outskirts of Riohacha, Colombia, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia)

Luciane Mengual, 22, an Indigenous woman from the Wayuu community, poses with her baby at home in the Villa del Sur neighborhood, on the outskirts of Riohacha, Colombia, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Ivan Valencia)

Anyway, we’re not here for a lesson, we’re here for some ultra-violence. “A Working Man” does it well, especially a struggle in the confined space of a moving van. The plot gets a little stretched over two hours — including a ludicrous motorcycle chase scene when enough bullets are fired at Statham as were expended in the Battle of Fallujah — but a bright moment is having the snatched teen (a very good Arianna Rivas, someone to watch) step into her own power.“A Working Man” is exactly what you expect when you unleash Statham on a noble mission. “You killed your way into this,” he’s told by his buddy. “You’re gonna have to kill your way out of it.” In other words, let Statham work, man.

“A Working Man,” an Amazon MGM Studios release in theaters this Friday, is rated R for “strong violence, language throughout and drug content.” Running time: 116 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.Whatever cruelness you might assign to the month, Dea Kulumbegashvili’s “April” probably has it beat.Kulumbegashvili’s shattering, sensational film is set in a hardscrabble, provincial region of Georgia, the Eastern European country. Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the leading obstetrician at the local hospital and she leads a punishing life.

In the film’s opening scenes, she delivers a baby — Kulumbegashvili films it from overhead — who doesn’t cry once born. Sterile hallways and men demanding answers follow the stillbirth and the fleshy, bloody images of the operating room. Though Nina has done thousands of deliveries, the father calls for a police investigation. Left alone with Nina, he tells her he knows she gives abortions in the village. He calls her a murderer and spits on her.Nina experiences the moment with horror and silence, a pervading register in “April.” Kulumbegashvil’s film is formally composed and rigorously opaque, but it churns with an underlying, aching despair.

Abortion — legal but fraught in Georgia — is central to “April.” But Nina’s predicament and loneliness stem from something even deeper. Again and again, “April” places its solitary female protagonist in scenes where every gesture — professional or intimate — is treated as lesser, an imbalance that’s violently and brutally impressed upon Nina.

In “April,” where Nina traverses a harsh, isolating landscape, the most resonate, disquieting sounds are the soft, sad murmurs of the deaf-mute teen (Roza Kancheishvili) for whom Nina performs a kitchen table abortion. It’s a procedure, shot statically from the side with only half of her visible, necessitated by a mysterious rape. The girl’s mother has no answers. In “April,” even howls of pain go unuttered, and only the storm cloud skies cry.Many ultimately settled in Southern California’s Orange County in an area now known as “Little Saigon,” not far from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, where the first refugees were airlifted upon reaching the U.S. The diaspora now also has significant populations in Virginia, Texas and Washington state, as well as in countries including France and Australia. Still, the community in Southern California comprises the largest and most well-established Vietnamese population anywhere outside Vietnam.

Memories of Wednesday’s anniversary of the fall of Saigon — the South Vietnamese city renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the communists — has conjured up mixed feelings from grief and resentment to honor and pride in the diaspora here.Hung Vu, 73, a former South Vietnamese army officer who left the country in 1975, works at his army surplus store in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, Calif., April 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Hung Vu, 73, a former South Vietnamese army officer who left the country in 1975, works at his army surplus store in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, Calif., April 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)A woman walks past a “1975" installation in the parking lot of Asian Garden Mall as the sun sets behind it in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Westminster, Calif., April 21, 2025. The display marks the year of the fall of Saigon. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)