Movie Nation

“She Walks in Darkness” is a Spanish police thriller that’s content with being more of a solid and sturdy take on its subject than a thrilling and suspenseful one.

There are tense moments, here and there, most of which aren’t scripted, acted and edited to maximize their impact. When it finally gets up some speed for a breathless finish, even that plays as muted.

The film’s opening title sets the uncertain tone, a tale of a multi-faceted police effort to break up dogged terror group. “This could be one of their stories,” writer-director Agustín Díaz Yanes coyly writes. So, not a “true” story. Perhaps a trifle “true-ish.”

It’s about a police officer sent deep undercover to infiltrate the pernicious Basque separatist group ETA, which devolved from a political movement not shy about violence into a fringe faction given to kidnapping and murdering political opponents of every stripe. With every shooting, bombing and assassination, the police doggedly stay the course of a long investigation. With every violent act in the ’90s and 2000s, the country is shaken and ETA grows more widely hated.

But the film’s story of blood-stained police “patience,” trying to roll up an entire organization when constant arrests of those figures they had plenty of evidence on allows the viewer to second guess if repeatedly their organization and reducing their ranks through arresting their way up the ladder might have saved lives.

Susan Abaitua, a Spanish dead ringer for Dakota Johnson, stars as officer Amaya, an orphaned college grad who turned from translating Yeats and tutoring into Spanish to uniformed police work. As she knows Basque, she’s recruited to be sent to the northwest, to San Sebastian and the Basque region along the French border.

As the Basques have their own dialect, history and culture and live in the mountains on both sides of the Franco-Spanish frontier, their sixty years of resistence to Spanish and French domination seems understandable. But the struggle, which began under the Franco dictatorship, reached something of a conclusion in the decade or so after the Generalissimo’s death. It’s just that some diehards refused to lay down their arms.

Amaya is given a new background, a comatose imposter mother and a mission in the mid-90s. Only “four people will know your true identity,” her captain (Andrés Gertrúdix) assures her. What he doesn’t tell her is that her commitment will take years, that her plans for life with her fiancé will be put on hold or indeed imperiled.

What he doesn’t tell her is that ID’ing ETA members, safe houses and weapons caches won’t be enough. She takes the risks, gathers information and and passes it on A wider and wider network of terror cells — mostly organized on the French side of the border — is recognized, its members identified and slowly pinned-down.

And bodies of council members, party leaders, law professors and bystanders pile up while the investigation continues. Suspected “moles” within the group, which finally starts to be rolled up years later — are executed right in front of her. Amaya finds herself forced to pull the trigger to save her neck when a cop killing goes wrong.

Even so, her ETA boss (Iraia Elias) has got to question the young woman’s motives. “I came to help with the cause,” (in Basque, French and Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed) hardly seems convincing.

“She Walks in Darkness,” more colorfully titled “Un fantasma en la batalla (“A Ghost in the Battle”)” in Spanish, studiously avoids turning melodramatic, but does a middling job of suggesting the stress, paranoia and fear that must accompany this most dangerous corner of policing.

Abaitua is given moments to get across the grim, guarded nature of living this sort of lie, forced into violence as self-preservation and revolted by it.

But the picture is entirely too choppy — jumping back and forth in time — and cut and dried and “procedural” to show a beating heart, flesh and blood characters and the horrific costs that raise the stakes of it all.

And our lead character is too passively written and played to fully engage us in the story, a Spanish Dakota Johnson in more than just her beauty.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Susana Abaitua,
Andrés Gertrúdix, Iraia Elias, Ariadna Gil,
Raúl Arévalo, Cris Iglesias and Mikel Losada

Credits: Scripted and directed by Agustín Díaz Yanes. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

Before every threatrical “type,” there is an archetype, the model which inspires every version of that theme that follows.

At some point, sometime between the Golden Age of Tony Randall and “Ellen,” the “gay best friend” emerged as a movie, stage and tV trope, a character invented to give the leading lady support, self-confidence and if need be, a makeover.

“A Taste of Honey” is a dated but deliciously detailed slice of British “Kitchen Sink Realism,” a drama about an impulsive, confused teen stumbling through variations of the same mistakes her working class floozy of a mother made.

More than a few characters within it come off as stock “types.”

But consider what Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play grappled with. There’s an inter-racial romance at a time when British culture and British cinema pretended, for most intents and purposes, that Black people didn’t live there. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy ensues.

And homosexuality was illegal at the time, “the love that dare not speak its name,” the ruin of Oscar Wilde and open secret of Noel Coward. Who does our heroine turn to in her pregnant hour of need? Her new “gay best friend.”

For his third film, after “Look Back in Anger” and “The Entertainer,” stage director turned “angry young man” filmmaker Tony Richardson made a most unconventional drama destined to play as utterly conventional over half a century later. His and Delaney’s archetypes became stock “types” with decades of sitcoms, rom-coms and “coming out” stories to follow once the Western world got around to accepting love is color blind and that gay people exist and have the same humanity as anybody else.

“A Taste of Honey” is a gritty black and white tale of post-war Britain still in the economic doldrums, with class mobility a dream not yet awakened.

Sassy Jo, played as a naive, wide-eyed innocent with a hint of “fury” about her by screen newcomer Rita Tushingham, is a teen more than ready to bail out of high school. And she’s had more than enough of her unaffectionate, deadbeat tippler of a mother (Dora Bryan).

Mum Helen may lead the sing-alongs down’tha’pub and have the eye of younger and well-off WWII vet Peter (Robert Stephens). But Jo figures 17 years of neglect and dodging landlords because her mother never pays the rent is enough.

Salford, the port town part of greater Manchester, has plenty of just-scrape-by working class jobs available to a lass like her.

But that nice chap (Paul Danquah) who helped carry her armfull of belongings from the bus to the next apartment they won’t pay rent on makes a lot of eye contact. When he sees her again with a skinned knee, he bandages her up at his workplace. He’s the cook on a coastal freighter. And he’s interested.

She’s interested in the fact that he’s interested.

Amid the whirl of her mother’s determination to remarry, with her ill-tempered, hard-drinking one-eyed new mate deciding the endless scorn of a teenager is not for him, Jo takes a tumble for her sailor. And when she realizes she’s pregnant, he’s already sailed away.

Luckily, she’s already sharing a flat with newly-homeless Geoff (Murray Melvin), who is sensitive, overtly fey and yet responsible enough to want to care for her and her baby on the way.

“You need somebody to love you while you’re looking for somebody to love,” he tells her.

Richardson opens the film with a frenetic girls’ game of netball, energetically shot with a hand-held camera, and spends the rest of the movie dazzling us with his attention to working class detail — the dumpy, tiny flats, the less-than-scenic working waterfront and the proletarian amusements of the proles.

We duck into pubs and a dance club (where Elvis Costello’s dad is the band leader) and visit the downmarket peep shows of the semi-seedy “resort” town of Blackpool.

But it is Delaney’s dialogue that reminds us that it’s not melodrama if you’re actually living through it.

“The dream is gone,” Jo sighs. “But the baby’s real,” Geoff reminds her.

Jo’s teen sarcasm prefigures the wisecracking Beatles/Python era to come — cutting remarks that draw blood.

“You don’t look 40,” Jo tartly tells her “tart” of a mother. “You look a sort of well-preserved sixty!”

The script is a grab-bag of tropes, some of them already worn and weary at the time of its composition — clueless, compassion-free landlords, hated stepfather, neglectful self-interested mother, et al.

But the interracial romance is a marvel of tolerance totally and tonally out of step with its times. Jo doesn’t make much of it and assures her ring-offering lover that her mother “isn’t prejudiced.”

And the thing about Geoff is that she “sees” him — they meet when he shops for Italian loafers in the shop where she works — without more of a clue than his manner and voice.

“I’ve always wanted to know about people like you,” she enthuses. “Mind your own business,” he snaps.

“You’re like a big sister to me,” Jo crows.

Tushingham is gloriously real — by turns fragile and defiant, angry and fearful and fun in what would turn out to be a career-making performance. Her first film would lead to a career that included turns in “Doctor Zhivago,” “The Knack…And How to Get It” and even Edgar Wright’s recent “Last Night in Soho.”

Melvin finds pathos in spine in a character that could easily have become a stereotype. He goe light on the affectations, so much so that he’d never pass muster as a Kenneth Williams impersonator, and the role is the richer for that. His career put him in “Damn the Defiant!” “Barry Lyndon,” “The Lost City of Z” and a recurring character on TV’s “Torchwood” before he died in 2023.

And Richardson would top “Honey” with “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” and the ribald romp “Tom Jones” followed by a long career in Hollywood (“The Border,” “Hotel New Hampshire”).

But back in their “angry” youth, all of them contributed to the revival of British cinema through a reinvention of drama, films that got down and dirty and down to the brass tacks, “kitchen sink” and all.

Rating: TV-PG, adult themes, smoking

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Dora Bryan, Murray Melvin, Paul Danquah and Robert Stephens.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tony Richardson, adapted from the play by Shelagh Delaney.

Running time: 1:41

It’s Super Bowl weekend, or as your favorite beer, chips and wings advertiser and gutless local TV sports anchor calls it the weekend of the “Big Game/”

Speaking from experience, this is the best weekend of the year to A) fly somewhere or B) go to the movies. Jetliners are at half-capacity, typically. And the cinemas are largely empty.

That’s particularly true this year as no brilliant, crowd-drawing new offerings are being released to counter-program against Concussion Bowl LX.

“Send Help,” a survivalist working class vengeance horror comedy that’s a winner for director Sam Raimi and Rachel McAdams, will dominated the light turnout with a $10 million weekend.

Faith-based Angel Studios tries its hand at a chaste, profanity-free (if not exactly “faith based”) rom-com with the Kevin James stood-up-at-the-altar-in-Italy dud “Solo Mio.” It cleared $7.2  million. James teamed up with a whole Rhode Island family of filmmakers for this one, and all those Kinnanes wouldn’t know a reliable laugh if it bit any one of them in the bum.

There’s a K-pop group concert film from Bleecker Street, “Stray Kidz: The dominATE Experience,” which did well Thursday night and Friday and just enough Saturday to earn $5.564 million, taking third place. Are they a big deal with Gen Z or Gen Alpha? Or is this the low turnout the product of Bleecker Street’s limited screens and invisible marketing?

The French made, American and pan-European cast “Dracula” from action auteur Luc Besson is a lush and bloody take on an overtold tale. But even though Caleb Landry Jones isn’t box office and the supporting cast of Euro-lovelies are mostly unknown — save for Christoph Waltz — it fell a couple of $hundred thousand shy of $5 million.

“Zootopia 2” kept any other newcomers from cracking the top five earning over $4 million

Lionsgate’s latest “The Strangers” horror installment, “The Strangers 3,” is more senseless slaughter, we trust, as we’re not going to see that. That’s the royal “we” as in I won’t be bothered, and neither will the once-reliable horror crowd, which stayed home Thursday night and Friday and Sat. putting it’s opening weekend take at franchise killing $3.5 million. Terrible reviews didn’t help.

It might have edged “Avatar: Fire and Ash”;for sixth, but only by a few bucks.

Eighth place went to the latest Jason Statham vengeance action pic “Shelter” which cleared $2.42.

In ninth, the Jeff Bezos bribe money abortion “Melania” is on track to earn another $2.378 million from Hix in the Stix. Scathing reviews, followed by mass layoffs at the Bezos newspaper, The Washington Post, with director Brett Ratner, Melania and her tiny-fingered husband all over the Epstein child sex trafficking and perhaps snuff film ring files. But surely the bald runt who financed it — the name Bezos is in the latest dump of files 194 times –– figures it’s worth it.

And “The Housemaid” ($1.8) earned just enough to push “Marry Supreme,” a couple of limited new releases and the Oscar contender “Hamnet” out of the top ten.

Luc Besson’s “Dracula” is pretty much like everybody else’s “Dracula.”

Our Eastern European prince — played by Caleb Landry Jones — is dolled up in the style of Francis Ford Coppola’s ’92 take on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”

There’s a Mina (Zoë Bleu), the object of our blood-sucking vampire’ obsession. She has her realtor fiance Jonathan (Ewens Abid), but the toothsome seducer is not to be denied.

And there’s a vampire hunter, in this case an unnnamed priest (Christoph Waltz) who sounds like a “Van Helsing” even if we never hear his name.

“You know my desires,” a fetching vampire (Matilda De Angelis) purrs to her crucifixed interrogator.

“I know your needs,” the priest purrs back, offering a her little hemoglobin in liquid form.

The director of “The Fifth Element,” “La Femme Nikita” and “Lucy” adds an origin story/prologue to the tale, taking us back to the Middle Ages where our warrior count butchers invading Ottoman Turks and accidentally kills his beloved wife (Bleu again). He vows to get her back, murders an archbishop whose prayers didn’t save her and is thus cursed to search and “turn” others to search for him as he piles up riches and waits for centuries for Lisabeth’s reincarnation.

But other than some “Excalibur” over-decorated and gruesomely bloodied armor, a few interesting moments of period detail over the centuries and the odd anachronism, this “Dracula” — titled “A Love Story” in Europe — has little to recommend it.

The lumbering narrative never staggers to its feet for a suspenseful sprint. It’s ponderous. But as it was financed, set and filmed in Europe with a lot of nubile unknown female necks to be nibbled, which has long been Besson’s calling card, there is that.

Jones, star of Besson’s “Dogman,” has little about him that suggests aristocratic, dashing “gentleman,” which is how his character is supposed to come off when his retinue of vampires discover the new Lisabeth in 1889 Paris, just as the French Revolution’s centennial is being celebrated. Jones reaches for “soulful” a couple of times. But all the slaughtering of Muslims, vampire hunters and the young, the pretty and the innocent buries that.

One is tempted to call this brooding, self-serving and impulsive Dracula a “generation appropriate” version. He’s doing his sit-ups. But matinee idol Draculas of the Frank Langella variety are a thing of the cinematic past, or so it would appear.

We get to watch Vlad bite/slaughter his way through the 17th century French court and a 19th century convent — scenes filmed as blood-spraying orgies. But the lip service the script pays to obsessive, passionate “undying” love is just that — lip service before the fangs come back out.

Vlad the Impaler’s “familiars” here — his non-vampiric assistants — are a legion of unspeaking stone gargoyles brought to CGI animated life. Cute. But I prefer just one speaking, cowering, “Yes, Master!” “Renfield,” myself

This “Dracula” is somehow somewhat better than the worst versions of the tale we’ve seen in recent decades, but a few bites short of adequate or anything approaching Coppola’s ’90s film or Robert Eggers’ gorgeous and stark “Nosferatu.”

Rating: R, graphic, gruesome violence, sexual situations

Cast: Caleb Landry Jones,
Zoë Bleu, Matilda De Angelis. Guillaume de Tonquédec, Thalia Besson, Ewens Abid and Christoph Waltz.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luc Besson, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. A Vertical release.

Running time: 2:09

“Solo Mio” is a mild-mannered comedy of the “Left at the Altar/Honeymoon Goes Wrong” school. It’s a little “Runaway Bride,” a lot of “Honeymoon Crasher” or “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” but without any of the edge or many of the laughs of its predecessors.

Kevin James plays an elementary school school art teacher who has finally met Ms. Right (Julie Ann Emory), teaching at the same school, in his 50s. A cute in-class proposal gives them a video to remember The Big Moment by.

That video is still on his phone as he stands at the altar in Rome for their “destination wedding.” But she leaves him a heartfelt note and skips out.

“Solo Mio” kind of goes wrong at about the same time as the wedding. We don’t see what’s on the note. We don’t meet any of the families gathered there, and without that, the nature of the “disaster” isn’t all that messy, the humiliation is limited to the concierge and others our man Matt had pre-paid for their dream nuptials and honeymoon.

If only some sympathetic Italian barista (Nicole Grimaudo of the Italian comedy “Loose Cannons”) could take pity on him, keep him away from pickpocket kindergarteners, help him with the language, lift his spirits and mend his broken heart.

“You have to try, take chances,” she says trying to make Matthew dance, sing, live or something. She’s speaking to Matt, to the audience, and to the filmmakers, who ignore their own screenwritten advice.

Three credited screenwriters, including big and small screen veteran James, and their big idea is to have Matt counseled by a honeymooning therapist (Jonathan Roumie) a blustering boor (veteran screen heavy Kim Coates) who “bought the same (travel) package” and are thus witness to the shame of his dining alone or riding a pre-rented tandem bike solo.

“You’re NOT single,” one counsels. “You’re SINGLE” the other eggs on, promising a “dirty rebound” is in the offing.

The picture occasionally rises to “cute” and James dials down the “mall cop” pathetic to someone recognizable and relatable. Grimauda turns on the Italian charm.

But why cast veteran funnywoman Alyson Hannigan if you have so little for her to make fun of? Coates, released of the burden of playing Satanic goateed, blue-eyed whom Kevin Costner (“Open Range”) and his ilk shoot right between eyes, is the movie’s most reliable laugh.

A movie set in Rome and Siena shortchanges the scenery and falls short in too many other ways to count. The lack of “family” lowers the stakes and rubs comic “outrage” out of the picture. Let’s make the fleeing bride-to-be a non-entity, also lacking an edge.

A tentative, chaste courtship is fine. “Exes” creating complications is a plot point to be expected. Here, they’re so watered down and contrived as to be no obstacle at all to “true love.”

The production arranged a few third act surprises, one of which pays off warmly while the others flop like lead balloons. Why bother to park our cast in Siena during the Palio horse race if you can’t do something amusing or dramatic with that? The race is typically 90 seconds long. You can’t show us the finish?

James has been collaborating on short films with the seven Rhode Island Kinnane brothers, who earn writing, directing, editing and producing credits on “Solo Mio.” But keeping this enterprise “all in the family” practically screams out its shortcomings. Outside voices might have juiced the jokes, milked the comic situations and avoided the blunders of a travelogue rom-com that promises a little and can’t even deliver on that.

Rating: PG

Cast: Kevin James, Nicole Grimaudo, Julie Ann Emory, Julee Cerda, Jonathan Rounie, Alyson Hanigan and Kim Coates

Credits: Directed by Charles Kinnane and Daniel Kinnane, scripted by Kevin James, John Kinnane and Patrick Kinnane. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:40

The gone-too-soon passing of the great Canadian funnywoman Catherine O’Hara last week had an added touch of pathos about it that other great comedians could appreciate — the timing.

O’Hara went to that great Second City Alumi Reunion in the Sky on the day before the Westminster Dog Show’s annual pageant of all things “judged” about canines. Thinking about her over the weekend of “best in group/breed/show” events on the tube must have reminded many of the finest of her finest hours, “Best of Show.”

The dizzy matriarch of “Schitt’s Creek,” diva of Canada’s version of “Second City” and mom who makes guilt-ridden from leaving her kid “Home Alone” amusing was never funnier than she was in Christopher Guest’s improv also-rans in a string of films that began with “Waiting for Guffman” and ended with the uncelebrated “Mascots.” That partly-improvising ensemble comedy filmed without two of the company’s mainstays — O’Hara and her “Second City” partner in caricature, Eugene Levy — was released to no acclaim and failed accordingly.

The rep company’s “inside a dog show” comedy “Best in Show” (2000) is the funniest and most-loved of the lot. O’Hara — playing a Florida dog owner/”handler” with a torrid sexual past — was never funnier and was as cringey as the comedy legend ever got. Her dolled-up, cleavaged-down Cookie Fleck has every man over 40 that she and her buck-toothed dork of a husband Gerry (Levy) meet remembering how much of the Kama Sutra they tried out in days gone by, and the lecherous rubes are tactless enough to have those recollections in front of her hapless literal “two left feet” husband.

The Flecks compete their little Norwich Terrier all the way from Fern City, Fla. to The Mayflower Dog Show in Philly, an event set up, hosted and filmed like the long-running Westminster Dog Show in NYC.

Our mockumentary follows the Flecks,  a married pair (Parker Posey and Michael Hitchcock) whose neurotic Weimeraner has them in couples counseling, the gay couple (John Michael Higgins over-the-top bitchy/swishy, and Michael McKean) competing a Shih Tzu and the married-money golddigger (Jennifer Coolidge) who has tough broad Jane Lynch as her Standard Poodle’s handler.

A long shot? That would be a Pine Nut, N.C. good’ol boy (actor/director Guest) with showbiz aspirations and a bloodhound who is the biggest boo boo of them all.

They’re interviewed at home or in their shrink’s office, followed on the road trips to the event, captured primping their dogs and overheard at their bitchiest in the vain hope that at least some of them will be funnier than the clueless TV host for the event played by Fred Willard.

His character was inspired by dizzy ex-big leaguer turned baseball announcer, Joe Garagiola, inexplicably hired for YEARS of Westminster color commentaries,

“Now tell me,” the cocksure but clueless Buck Laughlin (Willard) asks, “Which one of these dogs would you want to have as your wide receiver on your football team?”

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How do you screw up a “ticking clock thriller,” the surest among the sure-things in the action picture genre? You mess around with the “clock” too much, for starters.

In “96 Minutes,” set mostly aboard a couple of bullet trains in Taiwan, the timers on the bombs — you know, the cliched gadgets where all the suspense is in “Which wire do I cut?” — are decimal chonographs. They count down in 100 second increments.

Thus, every time a character says “How much time do we have?” and we can see “3649” on the LED display, another character blurts out “Just over an hour!”

But filmmakers Tzu-Hsuan Hung (director and co-writer), Yi-Fang Chen and Wan-Ju Yang don’t stop there. The clocks can be sped up or slowed down by our mad bomber’s design. If a train slows down (“Speed” style), the clocks speed up. If it speeds back up, the timer slows down, etc.

Whatever unspoken (in Mandarin or English) subtext the director of “The Scoundrels” and his co-writers were going for about physics, the nature of time, etc. (one character is a physics teacher) is unexplored and we sit and gape and wonder “How much longer does this trainwreck last?”

“96 Seconds” is about life and death dilemmas, self-sacrifice and choosing not to make a sacrifice and grief that takes the form of revenge. It opens with an event years past, pops into a “present” three years ago and skips forward to a current “present” when there are trains and bombs and flashback after flashback after flashback shows us characters “then” and now and a jumble of “personal” complications and motivations, enough to fill a season or two of your favorite soap opera.

At some point, my “not buying in” impulse curdled into “not buying any of this.”

Lee Lee-Zen of “The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon” plays the leader of a bomb squad glimpsed in the film’s opening scene in TV coverage of train wreck. No, Jie Li isn’t handling the aftermath of a bombing. The story isn’t being told in one long flashback. That earlier accident is a “clue.”

Jie Li is then in charge of a crime scene — a bomb that’s been planted in a cinema some time later. Luckily, he’s evacuated the theater and he has his best bomb-defuser A-Ren (Po-Hung Lin of “Suffocating Love”) on the case.

He’s got the bomb-survival suit, the portable X-ray and the wire-cutters necessary. As long as he’s not distracted by the wedding to Det. Huang (Vivian Sung of “Taipei Suicide Story”) he can’t quite make himself plan.

But defusing this bomb means — a sinister voice on the cell-phone declares — that another one in a crowded department store will go off. The bomb squad has to decide to set off the bomb they’re working on, or defuse it and trigger the other.

That awful dilemma, a snap decision with horrific consequences, frames the movie.

Because three years later, survivors of that earlier tragedy are on board trains leaving a memorial service when the same multi-bomb scenario presents itself.

Didn’t the bomber die in the first blast? Aren’t the bomb squad folks “heroes?”

A-Ren quit the bomb squad, is finally ready to plan that wedding and resolve to never go to this memorial service again. Jie Li is now a captain who has to talk A-Ren back into action. As the former bomb defuser’s mother and cop-fiancée are on board his train, he’s got real motivation.

“As long as you live, nothing else matters.”

A physics teacher played by Bo-Chieh Wang (of “Eye of the Storm”) in a troubled marriage injects himself into the plot. Is that his wife (Yao Titi) on the other train, not taking his calls?

And what does the phantom bomber mean when he threatens cops who “don’t want your secret exposed?”

The picture’s convoluted plot and fluid grasp of time contribute to the leaden pacing this supposed pulse-pounding thriller suffers from.

There’s gravitas in some of the performances, with overly-theatrical flourishes in others.

Sentimentality and grief is grafted onto murderous revenge as peripheral characters’ motivations are introduced, muddied up and then somehow “excused” in the confusion of bombs, ringing cell phones and a tsunami of supporting players acted panicked.

One has a hard time investing in this or that possible outcome because the script waters down each scenario and keeps shoving — via timers that SPEED UP or SLOW DOWN — the climax further and further into the future.

And as you might guess, the climax is almost preordained to be chased by an anti-climax that doesn’t so much rewind the ticking clock as make us wish they’d gone analog from the start.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Po-Hung Lin, Vivian Sung, Bo-Chieh Wang, Lee Lee-Zen and Yao Yiti

Credits: Directed by
Tzu-Hsuan Hung, scripted by Yi-Fang Chen, Wan-Ju Yang and
Tzu-Hsuan Hung A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:56

Long before he became “The Boy from Oz,” and just as he was considering growing his sideburns for the role that made him, Hugh Jackman co-starred in a featherweight rom-com from Oz that established his sweet and “sensistive” credentionals on the screen. Well, “sweet and sensitive” by Australian standards, anyway.

As the “Paperback Hero,” he’s a man’s man in a manly line of work and best buds with his cattle dog Lance. Jack Willis is a shirt-opened, shorts and boots bloke who drives a tractor trailer, one of those Aussie Outback “Road Trains” with plenty of trailers and not much chance of braking on a “banana.” That’s the dollar coin Down Under, Bruce.

But under Jack’s furry and fit bloke’s bloke exterior beats a sensitive(ish) heart, a fellow who scribbles ideas and pages for his “trashy” WWII era romance novel on roadhouse napkins.

He’s a Lucktown lad with an assigned parking place at the Boomerang and an ongoing, lifelong prank contest with the fetching crop duster pilot, Ruby (Claudia Carvan) who inherited her plane and the Boomerang from her late father.

Ruby’s got a plan — marry steady beau Hamish (Andrew S. Gilbert), the local veterinarian and settle into a comfortable conventional life.

Silly Hamish. Did he not see “Four Weddings and a Funeral?” Guys named “Hamish” almost never “get the girl.” And when they do, they can’t keep her. Some actor named Hugh just won’t let it happen.

The comedy here is that Jack’s kept his writing a secret. When he pitched “Bird in the Hand” to publishers, he used Ruby’s name. Now the bloody book’s been put into print and the publishing house wants to publicize its new star writer, a woman named Ruby who writes bluff and blustery prose in a genre known for its femine floral excesses.

Ruby’s got to “be” him. C’mon, help a mate out!

“How could you write anything romantic?”

Before she knows it, Ruby’s accepted a deal to get her wedding paid for. And on the long truck drive (with campouts) to Sydney, she’ll get a half-assed crash course on the first novel and her “inspiration” for it. But not being a lass of letters, one comparison every interviewer makes is sure to throw her.

“Daphne Du Maurier” was a Hitchcock favorite (“Rebecca,” “The Birds” ) queen of “middlebrow romances” back in the day.

“Is she from Sydney?” No, dear.

Jackman is downright boyish as Jack, with a higher voice and shorter sideburns and not exactly as rough and tumble as the part suggests he has to be. There’ll be no roadhouse brawls or trucker throwdowns here, mate.

A karaoke sing-along to Roy Orbison? That’s the ticket.

Karvan had already had roles in Gillian Armstrong and Philip Noyce films in Oz and was top billed here. She has Tomboy credibility and great chemistry with Jackman, and has enjoyed a long career in Aussie TV in the decades since.

Jeanie Drynan, who plays the brassy co-owner of the struggling local hotel and waitress at the Boomerang, was in early Australian break-out films “Don’s Party” and “Muriel’s Wedding.” Nobody else in “Paperback,” in front of or behind the camera, went to make a mark in Hollywood or even widely exported Australian cinema.

But Jackman made a mark big enough for them all — Wolverine superstardom, “Les Miserables,” rom-coms to “Song Sung Blue.” All he had to do was deepen his voice and grow hair anywhere and everywhere he could.

And to think the earliest big screen signs of his hunky charm came from a mushy road train trucker who writes romance novels.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, alcohol consumption, sexual situations

Cast: Claudia Karvan, Hugh Jackman, Angie Milliken, Andrew S. Gilbert and Jeanie Drynan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Antony J. Bowman. a release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:36

Preston Sturges may have had a decade of sparkling dialogue for films and such scripts as the holiday delight “Remember the Night” and “The Good Fairy” on his resume when he finally got to use “written and directed by” in his credits. But it would still be a mistake to label “The Great McGinty,” his directing debut, one of his very best.

“Sullivan’s Travels,” “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “Unfaithfully Yours” were to follow, after all.

But 1940’s “McGinty” had glimpses of the trademark Sturges cynicism with a faint touch of optimism, his populism and the crackling screwball comedy banter that would make him an icon of Golden Age Hollywood.

This time out, the dialogue was straight out of “Palookaville.”

“You got me all a’tremble. I bet you’re scared TO DEATH of yourself!”

He took the “romance” out of courtship to comic effect and dared to see optimism in the most cynical political operators.

Sturges cast a couple of Black actors in stereotypical subservient roles, but sees to it that they get their laughs from digging commentary at the white folks, something he’d expand on as his career progressed and Hollywood evolved.

And he built his film around not big name stars, but a trio of the great character actors of his day — Brian Donlevy, William Demarest and Akim Tamiroff. That pays off in most very scene and gives the picture a cute little kick in the finale.

The story here is a Roosevelt/Huey P. Long era political satire, about a down-on-his-luck mug who stumbles his way from voter fraud to “collecting” to graft to Big Time Graft, but who starts to grow a conscience about “helping folks” as he does.

You see veteran tough guy Donlevy (a “Beau Geste” Oscar nominee) in the corner of your eye in the opening scene, in which a tipsy American barfly (Louis Jean Heydt) staggers into a “Banana Republic” suicide attempt before the sultry saloon singer (Steffi Duna) enlists the bartender in helping her pull this failed bank clerk together.

You think you got it bad, the bartender (Donlevy) wants to know? “I used to be a governor.”

The story of Dan McGinty’s rise and fall is told in flashback, a burly, blustery hustler on the bum until he’s solicited to “vote” by a political fixer (Demarest). Two bucks if you go vote for Mayor Tillingast.

Greedy McGinty wants to know how many times he can get away with that unregistered voter scheme.

“Whaddaya think this is, Hicks Corners? Some people is too lazy to vote, that’s all. They don’t like this kind of weather. Some of ’em is sick in bed and can’t vote. Fixer Skeeter (Demarest) pauses a beat.

“Maybe a couple of ’em croaked recently…” 

McGinty pulls the scam at 37 polling stations, which is how he meets the Big Boss (Tamiroff), who pulls all the strings in this town and who lapses into his native Russian at the first sign of aggravation.

A Russian fixing elections? Go on.

McGinty becomes a mob collector then a mob alderman. And when the jig is up on that corrupt administration, he becomes the “unknown” alternative “reform” candidate. He can be the mob mayor if he just runs out and gets himself married.

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The Rachel McAdams/Dylan O’Brien “Castaway” with a whiff of “Misery”“Send Help” is opening to decent reviews and audience exit-scores (Unlike critics, audiences pick a movie that they expect they’ll like) and a $20 million opening weekend.

That’s good enough to best the indie video game turned feature thriller “Iron Lung,” which is doing really well among gamers despite having a no-name cast, including the director, and little more than word of mouth promoting it. It hit $18 million, depending on the snowy day turnout in the Southeast and elsewhere.

Meanwhile, out in the Pedophile Protector Belt of rural America, “Melania” is doing big bucks. The pervy Brett Ratner-directed documentary about sex-worker/ illegal immigrant First “Lady” from the former Soviet Empire is on track to earn $7 million frompeople whose internet search histories you wouldn’t want to stumble through. Audience exit scores are reverse IQ tests in this case, as this one is earning savage reviews from the better educated. At least it gets “them” out of the house,because heaven knows what goes on there, right?

“Zootopia 2” is in fourth, adding another $5.8 million to its $408 million and counting tally.

Jason Statham has made bank in previous Januaries with J-Stath-styled action/avenging. “Shelter,” distributed by tiny outfit Black Bear cracked the top five with a $5.5 million opening. .

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” is is around $5.5 as well and seems to have FINALLY exited the top five. But Monday we’ll know if Black Bear was fudging their estimates (They say “Shelter” earned $5.505).

The tumbling Chris Pratt bomb “Mercy” ($4.73), Sydney Sweeney’s blockbuster “The Housemaid” ($3.5, over $120 million since release), the Oscar contender “Marty Supreme” ($2.913 closing in on $100 million) and the bombing “28 Years Later: Bone Temple” ($1.6) finish off the top ten, unless a lot of people realize they need to see “Hamnet” ($1.5) by midnight Sunday.