Movie Nation

Maverick movie maker, indie icon, “Pope of Pop Cinema,” sponsor of the careers of the great and near great, Roger Corman made a singular mark on the movies over a career that spanned half a century.

Directors Demme and Coppola and Ron Howard  and others got their start making movies the Corman way — fast and fun and furious and cheap. Actors such as Jack Nicholson got their foot in the filmmaking door on Corman sets.

Just last week I reviewed “Machine Gun Kelly,” a breakthrough film for the director, producer and impresario, and for actor Charles Bronson. It crackles with energy and plays as if it was shot in ten days. Which it was.

That’s the best way to remember him today, watching one of his gangster movies, his monster pics, his beloved Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

Got to Tubi or YouTube or Amazon and watch one. They’re all over the free streamers.

He led a life and had a career worth celebrating, and that’s a way to celebrate it.

Long before its gambling revival and later slow return to decay, long before Louis Malle’s 1980 drama “Atlantic City,” the historic but forlorn resort city had been emblematic of American ennui, a place of elegaic, baroque nostalgia and decline.

The boardwalk beachside town, immortalized on the board game “Monopoly,” is a most evocative setting for director Bob Rafelson’s “The King of Marvin Gardens,” another of his classic collaborations (“Five Easy Pieces,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) with his muse, Jack Nicholson.

It’s an essay in excess, depression and delusions, capturing an America that had turned the corner on Vietnam as it braced for the Watergate scandal to come. Downbeat, droll and thought-provoking, it lets Nicholson play the quiet, brooding and long-suffering intellectual younger brother to a mercurial hustler sibling, Jason (Bruce Dern).

Many of this classic film’s pleasures derive from this mismatch, Nicholson maintaining his “Five Easy Pieces” cool, Dern at his most bug-eyed, pattering “Great Gatsby” manic.

Nicholson is a Philadelphia radio host from the golden age of radio monologuists. He’s a considered, self-confessional storyteller — Jean Shepherd or Garrison Keillor without the laughs. He still lives with a grandfather (Charles LaVine) who mocks the stories he hears grandson David weave on the FM airwaves, with the story David is telling that opens the film a possible whopper about granddad and his two grandsons’ conspiring to let him choke on a fishbone.

There’s a message, a summons from Jason down Atlantic City way. “Get your ass down here fast! Our kingdom has come!”

David gets off the train, greeted by a fading beauty queen (Ellen Burstyn) in a “Welcome to Atlantic City” costume, accompanied by a decrepit five piece brass band.

Jason, it turns out, is in jail.

Dern devours the screen, shouting-down fellow inmates in the holding cell, bowling-over the viewer with his energy, his protests of “a misunderstanding” and that he can get this fellow “Louis” to make this all go away.

David? He’s got the resigned silence of the sibling who’s heard all this before.

“I love all the hustle around here,” Jason bellows. It’s out in the open!”

His latest scheme involves a developable island off the coast of Honolulu, some potential Japanese backers, and that mysterious “Louis,” whom David can never seem to track down.

Sally (Burstyn) is Jason’s paramour, staying in their pick of the aging, elegant and almost empty hotels of a tourist trap that’s trapped-out — we only ever see small clusters of little old ladies visiting — and off-season, to boot.

Beach towns in winter are always great settings, “Marvin Gardens” to “Ruby in Paradise” and beyond.

Sally’s aged out of her dream — kind of. Now she’s raised Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson) to be her next shot at Miss America.

In one bitterly funny scene, we get a taste of Sally’s “talent” as she plays the world’s largest organ in Atlantic City’s vast, pageant-friendly but empty “Boardwalk Hall” as David MC’s a fake beauty contest and Jessica tapdances to an older-than-old Irving Berlin number, “Steppin’ Out With My Baby.”

“I wish you didn’t think I was a part of all this,” she tells David. But she is, along with dizzy, desperate and short-tempered Sally, the antic Jason and everyone Jason can lure into his orbit.

David’s got a secret. And an obligation to try and help his brother, who can’t be satisfied with just deluding himself. Others have to believe, buy in and sign on. Maybe this time, his ship will really come in.

Nicholson’s the great reactor, here, unblinking at Dern’s boisterous sales pitches, tirades, threats and plots. Burstyn is an open wound, a victim of a faithless lover who is more interested in Jessica, a dreamer who has hitched her wagon to that last fellow dreamer to give her a second look.

The script suggests an ever-shrinking city and circle of hustles and hustlers — trading, making deals on faded hotels and attractions, or claiming that deals have already been made. The “Monopoly” allegory is pretty obvious, suggesting that it takes optimisim and chutzpah to play the game and win.

David? “He’s got only one thing,” Sally declares, ticking off that “one thing” on her fingers. “That’s depression, suspicion, and mistrust.”

Nicholson’s future “The Shining” co-star Scatman Crothers is impressive as maybe the one hustler/real-estate shuffler in town still drawing a crowd — to a strip club, back room gambling (pre-casinos) and who knows what else.

Rafelson, Nicholson’s pal and collaborater since The Monkees movie “Head,” wasn’t shy about laying on the surreal, from the daft “Welcome” ceremony for David at the train station to the faux pagaent to a random, wintry morning’s horseback ride on the beach as workmen labor over restoring the planks on the vast Boardwalk that made the city, and the board game, famous.

Rafelson is a big reason we say “They don’t make movies like this any more” and “The ’70s were the greatest decade in American cinema.”

“The King of Marvin Gardens” is quirky, downbeat and allegorical, a challenging film that unfolds with the patience of David’s opening (and interrupted) six minute monologue about himself, his brother, their grandfather and fishbones.

Its genre-defying oddness makes “Marvin Gardens” a stand-out credit in every career that participated in it. Bursytn’s run during this time included the even more nostalgic “The Last Picture Show” and the blockbuster, “The Exorcist.”

And Nicholson, the actor and secret screen-rewriter and scene-polisher, is a bespectacled wonder here, giving us no hint of the larger than life figure he hinted at in “Easy Rider” and eschewed in “Five Easy Pieces” and even “Chinatown.” The early ’70s were where he figured out he could make a big impact by underplaying.

The giant personality who would almost everywhelm in films from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Terms of Endearment” and “The Departed” and “As Good as it Gets” would become a screen icon, but the actor who could make us come to him in “Five Easy Pieces,” “About Schmidt” and “Reds” was always there, as well.

As edgy and understated as “Five Easy Pieces” was, “The King of Marvin Gardens” comes off as even stranger with the passage of time. And as the years and fads and business cycles pass, the Atlantic City seen here loom even larger in the memory, a pre-bankrupt casinos wonderland before the post-Trump wasteland it became.

Rating: R, violence, nudity

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson and Scatman Crothers.

Credits: Directed by Bob Rafelson, scripted by Jacob Brackman. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:43

Slick, sex-uped and maddeningly-shallow, “The Courier” is another variation on the “get rich quick via money-laundering” formula based on real events that roiled Europe and Spain in the early 2000s.

We learn precious little about the backers, reasons (real estate hustles, much of it financed by China) and economic perils of off-the-books cash-shuffling, because Daniel Calparsoso’s film — “The Warning” was his — is always in a mad rush to take us to the next night of clubbing with cocaine, the next posh sports car roll up (Porshes, Audis and AMGs) or the next sexual romp involving our anti-hero, Iván Márquez (Arón Piper), just another striver from Vallecas, a lowly parking valet who angles his way into the world of high rollers.

“El Correo/The Courier” tracks Iván’s abrupt introduction to this world and sudden rise in it without really getting into “details.”

The story is framed, as such tales inevitably are, within his downfall — showing up in a shipping container full of Euros.

Fast motion travel montages cover a lot of ground in those sports cars. And as he remembers his origins, we see Iván take up with the wife of one “financier (Laura Sepul) and the daughter (María Pedraza) of another (Spanish star Luis Tosar), and take on a bit of muscle (Nourdin Batan) as a “partner,” Piper voice-over narrates his character’s every inane thought.

“You know that one moment in life that can change everything…I was never the brightest kid in class” carries no more meaning in Spanish than it does dubbed into English.

The movie’s history, chronicling rapid development in the Spain of the 2000s, ending with Spain slumping back into the 20% unemployment that predated this “boom,” is disengenuous at best and barely sketched-in, mainly over the closing credits.

The settings have the sheen of affluence, the hedonistic sex of the very expensive underwear set and the world depicted is barely shown in a surface gloss. We know as little about our “forget his family/neglect his failed but righeous father” anti-hero at the end as we did at the beginning.

The more voice-over narration that winds through the soundtrack, the more I hated this facile, lazy exercise in excess.

Rating: TV-MA, some violence, sex, drugs, nudity, profanity

Cast: Arón Piper, María Pedraza, Laura Sepul, Nourdin Batan and Luis Tosar

Credits: Directed by Daniel Calparsoro, scripted by Patxi Amezcua and Alejo Flah. A Universal release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:39

One of the hallmarks of a classic film is the way it impacted the cinema of its day and all the movies on its subject that followed.

“Citizen Kane” changed the movies. “Stagecoach” became the benchmark of Westerns. And marriage, generally depicted in broad strokes — either sunny or dark — became something a lot more complicated to consider after the British “kitchen sink realism” of “A Kind of Loving” in 1962.

Based on a realistic novel by Stan Barstow, perhaps only a closted gay filmmaker in a country where homosexuality was still illegal, and a Jew in a culture still noted for its antisemitism, could have treated this subject with the sort of cynical, jaded beauty that the great John Schlesinger brought to it.

Schlesinger’s debut feature — he’d go on to make “Darling,” “Midnight Cowboy” and much later “Pacific Heights,” where I had the pleasure of interviewing him — was photographed by Denys Coop. Coop’s work on “Look Back in Anger,” “This Sporting Life,” and Schlesinger’s “A Kind of Living” and “Billy Liar” helped define an era in British film.

They moved domestic drama out of London, off of soundstages and into the stark, industrial north. Manchester and environs were the settings for its street and park life, with Fylde and Blackpool serving as the very place a working class bloke with “a white collar job” would take his bride on a honeymoon — the overcast and rocky British version of Atlantic City.

Alan Bates, very early in his run as one of the great leading men of his day, stars as Vic Brown, that “white collar” draftsman with a good job and “security” at a large, reputable firm.

But “security” isn’t on his mind, even on his beloved older sister’s (Pat Keen) wedding day. This opening scene lets us see a rowhouse (“semi-detached”) working class neighborhood dominated by its ancient church. But while the entrance of that church is where everybody is posed for wedding day photos, Schlesinger makes of point of letting all that business serve as the backdrop for the opening credits.

None of this “holy matrimony” and “sanctity of marriage” sentimentality will do. The world had already moved on from that. Now it was time for the movies to do the same.

Vic is ambitious enough to take his job seriously, outgoing enough to be “one of the lads” up for “pub crawling” after “the (soccer) match,” quick to share the latest nudie mag from France among the lot.

Vic has noticed the pretty and proper Ingrid (newcomer June Ritchie) around the office. He pines for her, stalks her to ride the same bus, and eventually fakes a “left my money at the office” excuse to get her to lend him ticket change just to start a conversation.

Among the piggish louts in his all-male department, she’s got a nickname — “the praying mantis.” Their distinction between “tarts” and “when it comes to marrying a bird, you want something else” has rubbed off on Vic. Ingrid, younger but from a more management class family, might be the one for him.

“A Kind of Loving” sets in motion what we’d now see as a most conventional screen “romance.” She’s falling in love. He might be, but his libido takes precedence. The on-and-off nature of the affair — movie dates, necking in the park, followed by an early ’60s version of “ghosting” — patiently plays out for the entire middle hour of the movie.

And then, also daring for its time, she lets him know that she’s “late.” Their affair becomes a marriage, one that might be dictated by tradition, doing “the honorable thing” and family pressure, which could also be their undoing.

Bates, a beautiful and magnificently “real” screen presence in his heyday, lets us see the confusion and calculations in Vic, handsome but too naive to be a playboy or rake, too upstanding to not do the right thing, too fragile to endure the abuse of his not-working-class mother-in-law (Thora Bird, infuriating).

She is “enough to make a bloody vicar swear,” she is. But will Ingrid see that? Will his own family?

“A Kind of Loving” was the first British film to show a flash of skin, “daring” in its “shut your cakehole” and “bloody” this and that (mild) profanity and as frank as any English speaking movie of its day about sex. One is always “careful,” but Vic chickens out and buys booze at the chemists (pharmacy) when our lad went in to buy condoms, young lovers face the dilemma of “We mustn’t” when their hormones are insisting “We must.”

Easy “divorce” is introduced, and seen for the cliche it was to become. An old mate of Vic’s admits he’s had one, and shows off the 1935 MG-PA he bought to celebrate.

“A Kind of Loving” is the sort of revolutionary classic that reminds us how hard it is to see the revolution, as it happened, from a distance. Watch the chaste romances of the mid-50s, and then catch “The Entertainer,” “The Apartment” or “This Sporting Life” and this film. A generational sea change was happening, and the plays and movies that came along were merely following it and documenting the New Normal.

The perilous war years and the lean decade and a half that followed were turning into “The Swinging Sixties,” where marriage and “love” itself were being redefined by simply taking off the rose colored glasses and seeing romance and marriage for “A Kind of Loving.”

And in this Bates, Schlesinger and Ritchie masterpiece, scripted by Schlesinger collaborators Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse and lit and photographed by Denys Cooper, we have a gorgeous artifact of that — a patient, carefully-observed and sensitively- portrayed snapshot of a generation, culture and society shedding one value system and taking a hard look at a new one.

Rating: TV-PG, nudity, adult themes

Cast: Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Bert Palmer and Thora Bird

Credits: Directed by John Schlesinger, scripted by Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse, based on a novel by Stan Barstow. An Anglo-Amalgamated Film now streaming on Tubi, et al.

Running time: 1:53

It is one of the hoariest conventions in screen thrillers. Round up a bunch of people, some of them armed and dangerous. Park them in a roadside diner, and see what happens.

The classic “The Petrified Forest,” based on a hit Robert Sherwood play of the ’30s, did it first and best. But Tarantino paid homage to that set up in “Pulp Fiction,” and there are shades of it in “A History of Violence” and legions of stand-off, hostage situation and crooks-on-the-lam thrillers.

“The Last Stop in Yuma County” is a darkly funny variation on a well-worn plot and theme, cleverly-cast and sufficiently-twisty to be worth your trouble.

It’s the mid-70s, and a Joshua Tree region “last gas for 100 miles” filling station is gassed out. That’s what parks the traveling knife salesman (Jim Cummings) in that no-AC diner next door. Charlotte, the sheriff’s wife (Jocelin Donahue) is the waitress, cook (apparently) and rhubarb pie-pusher in charge.

They’re both a little leery of two toughs (Richard Brake and Nicholas Logan) who roll up in a green Ford Pinto. Say, wasn’t that the color of the car used in a bank robbery in Tuscon or somewheres?

They can’t warn the sheriff (Michael Abbott, Jr.) or his green deputy (Connor Paolo). At least others show up in the diner — an elderly couple (Robin Bartlett, Gene Jones), the 20ish lovers who figure out whose Pinto that is and what it has in it (Sierra McCormick and Ryan Masson), and the big guy who runs the empty gas station (Faizon Love).

It takes a while for everybody to get on the same page about what’s going down. And when they do, you can be sure that they and anybody else who rolls in, looking for gas or rhubarb pie, will be armed in one fashion or another.

The villains go from “Ain’t nobody gonna recognize us here” to “Drop it!” “No YOU drop it!” in a flash. And that’s where things turn interesting.

Writer-director Francis Galluppi’s feature debut is self-consciously, self-mockingly self-referential in where he borrows ideas, scenes and set ups. A character quotes “Badlands.” Roy Orbison is on the jukebox. Everybody is both a “type” and a seriously unpredictable “type.” And everybody in the cast gets just enough scenes to make an impression, and does.

The violence is visceral but realistic. About the only “over the top” things about the picture are the myriad misdirections that kick in just as things turn interesting, and just afterward. Didn’t see THAT coming. Not really.

It’s not the most ambitious, original thriller or dazzling writing-directing debut. But Galluppi makes his covenant with the genre and the audience, and fulfills his obligations in a solid and satisfying roadside diner drama with moments of suspense, blasts of violence and enough dark dry laughs to remind us it’s supposed to be fun.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue, Richard Brake, Nicholas Logan, Michael Abbott Jr., Robin Bartlett, Sierra McCormick, Gene Jones, Connor Paolo, Ryan Masson and Faizon Love.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Francis Galluppi. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:30

“Innocuous, predictable and well-cast” is about all the praise “Mother of the Bride” warrants, unless you consider another movie featuring the lovely scenery of Phuket, Thailand a deal-maker.

Looking for laughs in this Brooke Shields comedy is like panning for gold on a sunny beach in paradise — not the best use of your time or the location.

Shields stars as a driven, highly-strung single-mom geneticist whose daughter (“School of Rock” alumna Miranda Cosgrove) is terrified of telling her she’s just gotten engaged. Why? Mom’s not that bad.

She’s pretty cool about “the fact that you’re marrying a guy with initials” — RJ (Sean Teale) — “and not a name.” The wedding’s in Thailand because of daughter Emma’s new “brand ambaddasor” gig for a resort? In a month? OK. Fine. Whatever.

But about the father of the groom…

Benjamin Bratt classes up the joint as that dad, a fellow Mom had a long romance with back at Stanford. No problem, once we’ve gotten the “If RJ is my half-brother, the wedding’s off” joke out of the way. Sure, it’ll be “awkward.” But “awkward funny,” right?

Nope. Pratfalls, the “pickle ball incident,” Mom and Dad thrown together with romantic possibilities, a younger doctor nicknamed “sexy Doogie Howser” (Chad Michael Murray) might spice things up, but doesn’t. Aunt of the bride Janice (Rachael Harris) should sass things up, but doesn’t. The pushy corporate “brand” protecting wedding planner (Tasneem Roc) isn’t as hateable as is necessary. And so on.

Shields’ sitcom-polished mugging and reaction shots can’t wring giggles out of a tepid screenplay. And director Mark Waters is a long way from his “Mean Girls” glory and “Bad Santa 2” “edge.”

So there it is, a blase wedding with little romance and almost no laughs takes place in Thailand. I guess you had to be there — on set, a working vacation — to get anything out of it.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Brooke Shields, Benjamin Bratt, Miranda Cosgrove, Rachael Harris and Sean Teale.

Credits: Directed by Mark Waters, scripted by Robin Bernheim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

The phrase “spectacularly pointless” hangs over the tenth “Planet of the Apes” movie, a stand-alone sequel to “War for the Planet of the Apes,” which came out seven years ago.

Granted, I was thinking “umpteenth” in terms of the actual number of these films just as it began. And “What is the point of that?” cropped into my head watching the trailer to “Alien: Romulus” preceding the latest 20th Century Studios apes outing. That question lingered all the way through this 143 minute meander through CGI.

“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” features a lesser known cast, unfamiliar voices and motion-captured actors acting characters in a generic “hero’s journey” with a vague if not downright inane destination. Just figuring out who is whom and what their purpose in the saga is can be a struggle. Thankfully, the wearily predictable story beats solve those problems, if not the ones presented by “Who should we root for?” and “Why should we care?”

Visual, verbal and character references to earlier “Apes” films as well as “Water World” and assorted other sci-fi spectacles abound.

But little of it makes a lick of sense in a film that might be akin to the “last” “Apes” movie of the first 1970s run of the franchise, “Battle for the Planet of the Apes” — something of a placeholder film for any “Apes” ideas — films or series — to follow, should anybody believe that’s a good idea.

“Some generations” have passed since the death of the viral ape who led the planet’s simian takeover, Caesar. Apes have bent their society towards hunter-gatherers, with horses, tools, multi-story huts, and for the Eagle Clan, birds they’ve somehow trained in falconry.

Their separation from the human race seems complete, as mankind is almost extinct. But that doesn’t mean that conflict has ended. The strong prey on the weak, which is how the Eagle Clan village is sacked and most of its inhabitants taken hostage by the monkey minions of King Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand).

Son of a falconer Noa (Owen Teague of the “It” movies) promises his dying dad that he will find the tribe and “bring them home.”

Encounters with a wayward human (Freya Allen of TV’s “The Witcher”) may have led the raiders to their village. As Noa tracks the captors, she tracks him. And along the way, he meets the sage orangutan Raka (Peter Macon, the standout in the cast), a member of the ancient Order of Caesar, scholars, worshipers of Caesar doing “the work” of maintaining their oral history until they can figure out how this “storing” knowledge in these things called “books” works.

Raka laments the loss of “herds” of humans, their fate as mute “scavengers” who once walked with apes as equals (there’s a lot of history he wouldn’t know), and preaches “compassion” when the starving, silent but still-dressed human woman falls in with them.

“We will name her ‘Nova.’ We name them all ‘Nova.’ I know not why.”

That’s the lone bit of humor in VFX-guy turned directorWes Ball’s movie (he did some “Maze Runner” pics). His film takes pains — too many pains — to reintroduce us and immerse us in Apeworld, where ruined high-rises are covered in foiliage and the one recognizable landwork is that space age LAX “theme building,” also covered in greenery.

The landscapes, forest and CGI apes are next level realistic, and cost so much to get just right that we get scene after scene slowly setting up the rituals of this “new” society before the movie starts as that society is burned and kidnapped out of existence.

The “kingdom” that Proximus has founded from all these slaves is seaside, in a graveyard for ships and close to something the humans buried that he might might useful for world conquest.

The film’s “placeholder” label doesn’t just refer to the status quo ante that the story attempts to circle back to. Conflicts are arbitrary, and the brawls are perfunctory, “action beats” as defined in third year screenwriting classes. This Nova isn’t mute. And when she meets a human aide to Proximus (William H. Macy needed the money), they have a lot to talk about.

But the overarching gripe here is that initial one I brought up. What is the point? Pierre Boulle’s 1960s source novel touched on race and colonialism in a metaphorical sense. More recent films has grasped ecology and planetary degradation as driving themes behind humanity’s careless collapse and the rise of the apes and “Caesar’s Law.” Guns are introduced, but not politicized. Conflict is imposed, but the non-violence one half expects to see advocated is given a thought and abandoned.

There’s little hint of anything “deep” or “thoughtful” here. This is a dystopia whose origins we might remember, but whose teachable moments and “hope for a better tomorrow” elements are abandoned as we watch the apes climb for eagle eggs, and for their liberty, and chase and fight the enormous gorillas for some unclear notion of “freedom.”

It’s lovely to look at. But that leaden, endless time-suck of an opening act is a fatal flaw that “Kingdom” never overcomes. And two and a half hours is a helluva long time to take to get to a point, not that they ever do.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: The voices of Owen Teague, Kevin Durand, Lydia Peckham, Peter Macon, Travis Jefferey, with Freya Allen and William H. Macy

Credits: Directed by Wes Ball, scripted by Josh Freedman. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 2:23

One hesitates to label the latest thriller from Nicholas Tomnay (“The Perfect Host”) “yummy” or “delicious.”

Sure, it’s a culinary tale on the order of “The Menu.” But this most certainly isn’t “The Bear.”

“What You Wish” is a thriller with life or death on the line, with the super rich behaving badly and the people who “serve” them behaving even worse. This is fine dining with a taboo main course. Yeah, “that,” and without the “Twilight Zone” twist of being named for a cookbook.

The movie is about a desperate, broke chef who reconnects with rich culinary school classmate who jets around the world serving the swellest of the swells that which only he can prepare, and at prices that would make even a real billionaire swoon.

Who would’t be jealous of this lifestyle? But whatever Jack’s got going for him — fat bank account, endless upscale travel, free stays at swanky homes in exotic locales — he doesn’t seem all that happy about it. Old pal Ryan should get a clue.

But Ryan, played by Nick Stahl (of the TV version of “Let the Right One In”) with a calculated desperation, accepted this gift trip to an unnamed Latin American “paradise” (it was filmed in Colombia) with creditors on his tail — the kind of guys you deal with when you have a gambling problem.

Whatever it is that has successful chef Jack’s (Brian Groh) top-knot in a twist, serving “a lotta rich people” who “just want an extreme experience” at table, Ryan can only imagine. I mean, loan sharks are a REAL problem, right?

Jack’s “It’s not all glamor” and “the reward always matches the atrocity” warnings fall on deaf ears. When events conspire to put Ryan in Jeff’s chef jacket, in his rented, remote mansion, he figures he can handle impersonating his friend. And he has no qualms at all about trying.

But when “the agency” people show up, Imogen (Tamsin Topolski, giving off Brit-accented Elizabeth Holmes vibes) warns him “a bad dish will completely destroy the agency’s reputation.” That’s not nearly as scary as “a bad dish from you and your life will end.”

Ryan, posing as Jeff, must fool Imogen and her armed-and-dangerous fixer, the callous Maurice (Juan Carlos Messier, scary), and later the clients and still later the federal cop (Randy Vasquez, properly unflappable, up to a point) who shows up. It’s going to take more than Ryan’s grab-my-big-chance culinary skills to save his bacon.

The screenplay and Stahl let us see the calculations going on, the alarming problems back home and the horrific turn of events that makes Ryan’s abrupt and heartless decision to “take over” Jack’s gig and life logical. Or logical enough.

There’s a callous disconnect that I found less convincing as Maurice takes Ryan out to procure “produce” for this beyond-exclusive meal. You’d think Ryan would at least start to flip out at the monstrous turn of events, the lines he must instantly cross, the horrors he must tolerate and participate in. Stahl gives us little of that.

The second and third acts are about bloody meal prep, the barely-sketched-in rich diners, seeming bystanders and police who may not be as backward or as easily thrown off the scent as “the agency” expects.

Sometimes the suspense pays off and the movie’s twisted internal logic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Stahl doesn’t always allow the character human reactions to what he’s gotten himself into and what others may be dragged into with him.

But there’s suspense in more than one situation, and a darkly humorous seasoning to the later acts.

Sure, it’s easy to see this as a companion film from the guy who gave us “The Perfect Host.” But Tomnay throws in a couple of twists that pay off and puts us in Ryan’s shoes and chef jacket, trying to work out how in the hell he will get out of this meal-of-his-life alive

Will he skip out before dessert?

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Nick Stahl, Tamsin Topolski,
Juan Carlos Messier, RandyVasquez, Penelope Mitchell and Brian Groh.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Tomnay. A Magnolia/Magnet release.

Running time: 1:41

Historically, “Machine Gun Kelly” is about as accurate as the proverbial “two dollar watch.”

The movie about the infamous 1930s Memphis gangster was shot on the cheap in Southern California, with nothing that looks like Tennessee, not a trace of any Southern accent and a lot more violence than was ever attributed to the real George Kelly Barnes.

But 1958’s “Machine Gun Kelly” captures filmmaker and “indie” icon Roger Corman at his breakthrough moment, a screen story told — at least in the early scenes — in brisk brush strokes, ominous shadows and bursts of violence, a film acted with real heat and a screenplay — by R. Wright Campbell (“Man of a Thousand Faces,” “The Night Fighters”) — that plays up the cowardly sadism of its hero and features some of the flintiest dialogue of its day.

“I’m gonna carve a map of Hell right across your kisser!”

“You know, Kitten. I’m gonna get you a nice little white mouse for you to play with.”

“He’s awfully cocky for a man who can’t even crack a hick town bank.”

“Tell your old lady to keep her wise cracks behind her teeth or she’s gonna be wearing false ones!”

“I already do, smart aleck!”

The jazz score by Gerald Fried (“Killer’s Kiss,” “The Killing,” TV’s “Roots”) swings and sizzles so insistently that it carries the picture right up to the point the movie bogs down with a fictionalized version of the kidnapping that put Kelly behind bars.

Charles Bronson pops off the screen in the title role, a star-to-be playing up the sadism and woman-slapping bullying of this character, built up in history thanks to the “machine gun” moniker he wore and F.B.I. chief hypeman J. Edgar Hoover’s exaggerations, a mobster turned in the movie into a craven coward who fears anything to do with death — coffins, floral arrangements, etc.

If there’s anything this “Untouchables” era gangster picture has to say to the modern viewer, it might be that it takes a special kind of warped fraidy cat to covet the no-skills “power” of a machine gun.

But I have to say the picture promises more than it delivers. A bravura dialogue-free five minute opening shows us an early heist in quick, sure strokes. The robberies here are perfunctory, but beautifully framed and shot — shadows of gunplay, etc. It is the getaways that are elaborate, with Kelly and gang (Wally Campo, Jack Lambert, etc.) breaking down his Thompson Submachine Gun, tossing clothes and pistols, handing off the loot, splitting up and swapping cars.

Susan Cabot is the sexy, malevolent manipulator Flo, who shames her beau’s phobias, nags him into jobs, builds his myth and can take a punch or slap herself, because she has to.

Frank DeKova plays Harry, a “big game hunter” accomplice who keeps a menagerie of dangerous critters at his gas station, including a mountain lion he’s trapped. The comic Morey Amsterdam, later to gain fame via “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” is the treacherous weasel Fandango, aka “Fanny,” a weakling Kelly pushes around, tortures and costs an arm.

But Bronson and Cabot set off the real sparks, and even as the story shifts from bank robbing to kidnapping, our anti-hero’s undoing, they keep it watchable as the action subsides and the settings become various interior hideouts, with cops and the parents of a kidnapped little girl (never happened) working with the Feds (Michael Fox) to ensure that the world closes in around Machine Gun Kelly & Co.

The future mentor to generations of film folk, Nicholson and Coppola among them, Corman was supposedly fascinated by the gutless way Kelly went down, and built this film’s psychological portrait around that. He learned that timeless lesson from “Destry Rides Again,” that bullying monsters look awfully small when trapped, stuck in court, trying to stay awake, lying and lying about their exploits until no one believes they’re anything but what they really are — cowards without an audience, a gang or a machine gun to compensate for all the toughness they lack.

Rating: “approved,” violence

Cast: Charles Bronson, Susan Cabot, Morey Amsterdam, Connie Gilchrist, Richard Devon, Frank DeKova, Jack Lambert. Wally Campo and Michael Fox.

Credits: Directed by Roger Corman, scripted by R. Wright Campbell. An American International Pictures release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:23

“Black Panther” star Leticia Wright turns off any hint of glamour or “extrovert” in “Aisha,” a sublimely-understated drama of a young woman struggling with her past, her family obligations and “the system” as she tries to obtain emergency “self protection” status so that she can stay in Ireland.

She is living in a refugee hostel, working as a sympathetic hairdresser’s assistant, hoping her solicitor (Lorcan Cranitch) can deliver some good news about her efforts to make her move to Ireland permanent.

Something happened back in Benin City, and her mother back in Nigeria needs money. But even with a job, a lawyer and an ever-changing community of fellow immigrants who are shuffled in and out of the hostel as support, she can’t get her hopes up. And the unit director (Stuart Graham) is a stickler for rules and who doesn’t like back-talk when others lose their appeal and Aisha sticks up for them as they’re deported.

That could be trouble. The fact that she doesn’t trust the hostel’s “Halaal” certified meats also could get her labeled a trouble-maker.

But the new security guard (Josh O’Connor of “Challengers”) takes pity on her and lets her use the kitchen, after hours, to prep meals that conform to the tenets of her religion. .

As Aisha’s prospects dim, their bond grows stronger, although it may all come to naught if her “status” is denied.

Writer-director Frank Berry (“I Used to Live Here”) shows us his “homework” in one sequence of this “inspired by true” cases story. We and Aisha hear testimonials in conversation form from others residing at her hostel. The film makes it easy to sympathize with migrating people and their plights, but also appreciative of the lengths the EU — at least — has gone to treat people humanely and legally, providing them with legal counsel, housing them and propping them up until they get the chance to plead their cases.

Berry gives Wright and O’Connor some quietly wrenching moments, long interludes where Aisha is silently fighting back the tears and the guy who is sweet on her despite being unable to make eye contact struggles to say or do something to comfort her.

The script lets Wright hide her cards, not revealing everything about Aisha and her situation at once, letting us see the comfort of a new routine in an alien land, even if that “routine” is mere weeks or months old.

O’Connor is likably humble in the presence of this beautiful woman who has been tested in ways Conor could never imagine. But Conor the security guard has his “story,” too. Is she interested enough to let him tell it?

The stakes could not be more intimate and personal here, but as reassured as we might be that something like “due process” and “common sense” will prevail, Wright and O’Connor do a good job of playing people who aren’t so sure, whose faith in people — not the state — to show compassion has its limits.

The journey “Aisha” takes after the more perilous one our heroine undertook doesn’t cover a lot of ground. But Wright makes us, Aisha’s lawyer and Conor the security guard invest in this story and hope for an outcome out of step with our xephobic. immigrant-bashing times.

Rating: unrated, discussion of rape, other violence, smoking

Cast: Leticia Wright, Josh O’Connor, Stuart Graham, Lorcan Cranitch and Denis Conway

Credits: Scripted and directed by Frank Berry. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:31