Movie Nation

“Ali’s Wedding” opens with a guy in a tux, fleeing the Aussie cops on a tractor.

“Pool the veHICLE ovah!”

“Sorry mate, ah’m TRYIN’ t’get to the AIRport!”

Ali, our Iraqi-Australian hero, is running from his own wedding. And “Ali’s Wedding” is  semi-reverent romp about the lies, the culture and the family that put Ali (Osamah Sami) in this predicament.

Inspired by the real life of its co-writer/star, it’s a bracingly revealing portrait of Muslims transplants in the West, sweet and at times damned funny.

It dares to acknowledge those things that make Westerners blanch at the culture — sexism, rigidity to “the Way of The Prophet,” arranged marriages, a community that sits in judgment, ululating. 

But this Australian comedy finds humor in those, and in the Western ways which the young, and sometimes the old, have embraced. The most daring thing about this movie might be the ways it shows this “quaint” community can be amusing as Greeks, Italians, Jews, Indians, Mormons, African Americans or any other subculture that’s been the subject of screen romantic comedies, and no more threatening. 

Three lies made Ali the man he is. His father is a holy man, the mahdi, of a community of Australian Islamic expats. The lie that saved his father got them out of Saddam’s Iraq, “The second lie was believing we could have a life as Iraqis living in Iran.” And the third, “my biggest lie,” is the subject of the movie.

He’s carried the burden of being the second son and his father’s dream of raising a doctor with him ever since that older brother died, saving him from a minefield when he was a child. But Ali bombs out on his med school entrance exam. He can’t tell his father (Don Hany) because of the shame it will bring him in front of his congregation at the mosque.

Ali is crazy about Dianne (Helena Sawires), the sarcastic and beautiful young fish monger’s daughter who is smart enough for med school, even if her father and their community don’t approve.

“If her father is willing to turn his back on the way of The Prophet and let mix  with Westerners at the university,” is how that community shows its rigidity, and its passive-aggressive side. Ali’s heartfelt congratulations separate him from other possible suitors, and she starts to flirt back.

And that’s another problem. These two may click, but Ali’s parents (Frances Duca plays his over-the-top mom) have a suitable bride lined up. So there’s another lie he has to live. How far will Ali go to maintain these overlapping charades? Who will figure him out?

Director Jeffrey Walker, and co-writers Sami and Andrew Knight, take their cue from comedies about Indian and Pakistani expats in Britain, Australia or America. They populate this world with a wide rainbow of Muslims, from snobbish Arabs and Persians to working class Egyptians and Lebanese.

“Scarface” posters on the walls, thick Oz accents and Australian Rules Football (“footie”) on the telly, these folks are assimilating faster than even they realize.

Ali’s father is a flexible Mahdi, erring on the side of kindness when one of his flock is in tears over a tantrum in which he did the whole “I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee” thing and doesn’t want to lose his marriage. When Dianne scores well enough to get into Melbourne U. med school, the Mahdi silences his insulting, whispering congregation with a gentle reminder of which century and which country they’re all living in.

“If she were my daughter, I would be very proud.”

Dad is not just the spiritual leader of his flock, but a playwright whose Koranic parables are elaborate, whimsical productions that involve a lot of the guys (no women) from the community.

Dad’s dream show? “The Trial of Saddam Hussein.’ Believe me, it will be a comedy…with music.”

Ali will be his Saddam. He does a killer whiny-voiced Saddam for all his pals (from various cultures) at the convenience store where he works. Like young men the world over, the guys curse, joke around, look at porno mags and lie about women.

A white Aussie odd-man out among Ali’s convenience store pals wonders, “Can’t you guys have like 72 wives or some s—?”

Ali’s brother has the foulest mouth of them all. He’s a frosted-tips, butt-crack baring mechanic with the purplest Porsche in all of Australia.

“This is my JOB, Dad. I have to speak f—ing Australian!”

Only Ali’s ignored and plainly too-smart-for-this-patriarchy younger sister (Asal Shenaveh) figures out his entrance exam secret, though his snooty rival ((Shayan Salehian) has his suspicions.

That’s a lot of detail, but that’s where “Ali’s Wedding” works best — all these little slices of life, warm inside peeks at the culture and gentle comical jabs at it. Ali is dragged to a tea ceremony, the ritual where future husband meets future wife and the families give their approval. This isn’t who he wants to marry, and a frantic phone call to his more savvy pal Ayub is his lifeline.

“How do I NOT get married?” What decorums can he break, what breaches of tea ceremony etiquette will earn the disapproval of the father of the bride he doesn’t want?

That tea ceremony, by the way? Positively Austenesque.

The romance is utterly charming, largely thanks to Sawires’ winsome, aloof manner melting in the presences of this encouraging, kind and generally guileless young man who is plainly infatuated with her (Sami pulls that off with ease). Their chaste courtship, search for work-arounds for the Koran, furtively holding pinkies (not hands) at the movies, is just adorable.

The film is both Western and Middle Eastern, devout and comically blasphemous, praying for miracles, swearing at the heavens for a “bleeping” sign from Allah, which one suspects wouldn’t play in the Middle East.

It’s too long, meanders hither and yon in getting to the ending we’re looking for. The picture takes several detours along the way — flashbacks, the hope that Ali’s grandmother is still alive and might be able to get out of Iraq, a seriously unpleasant side trip to U.S. Border Patrol, power struggles at the mosque.

These just distract us from the thing that works, the love story, and the Arab aphorisms that bind the story together and makes it universal.

“A lie begins in the soul, and then travels the world.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with profanity, smoking

Cast: Osamah Sami, Don Hany, Helena Sawires, Frances Duca

Credits:Directed by Jeffrey Walker, script by Andrew Knight and Osamah Sami. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Will Patton is the headmaster, Samantha Mathis one of the more intense “teachers” in this horror offering, slated for the cinema’s late August dumping ground (the weekend of abandoned movies).

The curious thing about this trailer is the honor it bestows on “acclaimed” director Boaz Yakin, whose career path peaked with “Remember the Titans” and spiraled downward after the Brittany Murphy “comedy” “Uptown Girls” into maudlin war dog pictures (“Max”) and now this.

Brenton Thwaites is the pretty young reporter haunted by memories of his Afghanistan assignment, a cast of similarly little-knowns as his editor, his fiance.

And then there’s the fellow cast as the young reporter’s toughest assignment, “The Man” who claims he’s the Lord God Almighty. Landing David Strathairn was quite the coup, one of the great character actors of his time, a veteran of John Sayles indie classics, a definitive, Oscar-nominated Edward R. Murrow for “Good Night and Good Luck.”

The sentiments expressed here could be more accessible than the and angry and anti-intellectual “God’s Not Dead” Jeremiads.

“Interview with God” is due out later this year.

The dull repetition of “Jurassic Park” enjoys yet another dino deja vu outing with “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.”

Sure, give them points for shoehorning Jeff Goldblum, the quirky, cautionary Dr. Malcolm, into a couple of scenes warning a clueless Congress about the consequences of letting once-extinct dinosaurs live on, despite the repeated failures of the “Jurassic Park” business model.

That’s just to set up the next dinosaur dinner buffet, which is all any of these movies amount to. Dinosaurs live! Humans congratulate each other for resurrecting them. Dinosaurs get hungry. Humans dine out on the folly of man.

The failed theme park reboot of “Jurassic Park” has left the Isla Nublar facility a ruin still filled with living, fighting and breeding dinosaurs. And now the island’s volcano is erupting. Bryce Dallas Howard‘s park publicist has turned animal rights activist, running the Dinosaurs Protection Group. They’ve just gotten the bad news — Congress won’t rescue the surviving dinosaurs — when the mysterious partner of the late founder of the park (James Cromwell) throws out a lifeline — another island refuge she can move them to.

The billionaire’s foundation chief  (Rafe Spall) says there’s just one catch. OK, two. She has to do this on the down low. And she has to drag along her ex (Chris Pratt), the expert who raised and tamed the last velociraptor still alive there. It takes drinking and begging to get Owen back on her team.

“If I don’t make it back,” he tells her, tenderly, “remember, you’re the one who made me come.”

With punk veterinarian Zia (Danielle Pineda) and girly-voiced shrieking tech nerd stereotype Franklin (Justice Smith), they’ll help the “great white hunter” (Ted Levine) and his rough customers hunting crew track down and capture the dinosaurs before the volcano swallows the island, the ruined park and the last vestiges of the Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville there.

You’ve read that plot description, so you pretty much know what’s going to come. Michael Crichton’s long dead and gone, so Universal is flushing good money after bad on writers Derek Connolly and Colin Treverrow, who shamelessly collect checks for cutting and pasting action beats, situations and even storyboards from all the earlier films into a file and insisting it’s an “original screenplay.”

Like hell.

A novel underwater opening is about all they contribute. It’s easy for any viewer to guess, just by framing and camera placement, which of “Jurassic Park’s Greatest Bites” is coming next, from which side of the frame, from which dinosaur, and with which dramatic dinosaur pose at its climax.

Again and again I found myself stifling a “Didn’t see THAT coming,” which I so wanted to shout out loud.

Pratt’s act is wearing thin, which is saying more than his ability to do his own stunts. All these cut-aways as he hangs from this or clambers over that. The editing doesn’t hide it,  man. Sit-ups. Personal trainers.

But Howard does a dandy job of “selling” the frights here. Together with the latest billionaire offspring to be imperiled by the park (Isabella Sermon), Howard convinces us that whatever non profit her character is running, these toothy monsters sniffing around for redheaded flesh freak her the hell out. I appreciate a good, realistic reaction to horrific beyond belief. Still, when Ms. Howard’s the best thing in the picture, what’s that tell you?

The direction is pedestrian, with only a couple of scenes having any novelty to their set-up — a race against a pyroclastic (eruption) flow, a desperate trapped-underwater moment. My crack about “storyboards” earlier falls on J.A. Bayona, a fine director (“The Orphanage,” “The Impossible”) who just took a paycheck and cribbed set-ups and pay-offs from the earlier films for his dino-bites here.

The villains are generic oligarchs and those who serve the oligarch market (Toby Jones with dentures), standard issue for Trump era thrillers. The cat and mouse games with the stalking raptors have merely changed locales, from a lab to a mansion out of the Harry Potter movies.

I was one of the few naysayers when the franchise was rebooted with “Jurassic World,” yet even with the bar set lower for expectations on this one, I found it “Transformers” boring, a summer movie that however much it earns, fails to justify its existence.

At least there’s Goldblum’s Dr. Malcolm there to speak for those of us who think these movies smell to high heavens.

“When…will we learn? When?”

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of science-fiction violence and peril

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Justice Smith, James Cromwell, Daniella Pineda, Rafe Spall, Ted Levine, BD Wong, Toby Jones and Jeff Goldblum

Credits:Directed by, script by . A Universal  release.

Running time: 2:08

Eugene Jarecki’s “The King” is a moving masterpiece of music, pop culture montage and Big American Metaphor.

Yeah, it’s about Elvis and race and rock’n roll and America at the Trump Moment.

And it’s packed with interviews, from Elvis friends and Elvis fans to Elvis experts, throwing in a couple of haters — just one, really — for “balance.” Layers of TV and radio news coverage of Elvis and the world we live in today weave in and out of images of the Elvis Era and Beyond, although one of the most pointed arguments presented here is that we’re still in the Elvis Era, 30 years after his death. Performances of Elvis influences and Elvis himself and those who came after him are folded in.

That turns the movie into something the best written biographies of Elvis — both Greil Marcus and Peter Guralnick are among those interviewed — accomplish. It “rescues” him from his legacy, his more backward fans, his impersonators and the “cultural appropriation police.”

Jarecki’s gimmick here was acquiring the use of an Elvis car. No, it’s not one of his legion of Cadillacs, “which would have been poetic,” TV writer David Simon (“The Wire,” “Treme”) complains.

John Hiatt (“The Thing Called Love”), another interview subject, the singer-songwriter of a song about Presley’s “pretty pretty Cadillacs with Tennessee plates,” gets in the back of Presley’s 1963 Rolls Royce to be interviewed and perform a song and breaks down in tears.

Here it is, “the trap” that all that fame, all that money, the times he came up in and the “follow the money” path Col. Parker always insisted that he take, Hiatt suggests. So yes, even the wrong car is the perfect metaphor for the Elvis story arc.

And as we hear newscasters, opinionators and others lament, “What is WRONG with America?” in a 2016 election cycle blur on the soundtrack, the rapper Immortal Technique slides into the backseat, about to perform one of his angry, protest-tinged songs and drops this on us.

America is “Elvis about to O.D.,” he says, a nod to Trump and America’s decline. All that’s left now is dying on the toilet before our time.

Jarecki (“Why We Fight,” “Reagan”) is going for a more hopeful film than that, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Elvis analogy that’s been dangling in front of us for decades — taking greedy, cowardly short term gain with catastrophic long-term consequences — is merely writ large and indeed written in stone as “The King” makes its way to theaters.

The movie covers familiar Elvisiana — taking the Rolls (which breaks down, here and there) to Tupelo, the poor (mostly black) neighborhood where Elvis was born, to Memphis and neon-lit fame, New York and glory, the Army, the “Hollywood Years,” “The Comeback Special,” Vegas and The End.

Along the way, musicians walking in his footsteps crawl into the back seat and play, most charmingly, young Knoxville Blue Grass singer Emi Sunshine and Memphis soul-singing teens from the Stax Music Academy.  Some of them have thoughts on Elvis, some just have a song.

And other musicians, biographers, actors (Ethan Hawke, Mike Myers), journalists (Dan Rather), old friends and girlfriends and Memphis Mafia alumni tell his story, often in the front seat of this car that winds from Memphis to New York, and out to Las Vegas and back to Memphis.

CNN’s Van Jones remembers how much his father, another Memphis native, “hated” Elvis, how he’d taken black music and culture and gotten famous and “given nothing back.” Jones challenges Jarecki, “Why do you care so much about rescuing Elvis?” He quotes Public Enemy’s Chuck D and the song “Fight the Power,” with its infamous Elvis “was a straight-up racist” lyric.

Then a mellower Chuck D shows up and recalls thinking that at the time, but softening on the whole cultural appropriation thing as he’s matured. He may be the marvel of all these interviews, ruminating on the crushing weight of that level of fame, the circumscribed choices Elvis was shoehorned into and declaring an appreciation for the singer’s authenticity.

TV writer Simon is more blunt. Haters? “They’re not listening to the records,” the amalgam of country, gospel and blues Elvis channeled into something new.

James Carville talks about how the world changed, in an instant, with Presley’s arrival. Alec Baldwin weighs in on the physical beauty, “the most perfect looking guy ever” that was part of the package, Hawke and Mike Myers (?!) gripe about the fateful decision to “go Hollywood.”

“Celebrity is the industrial disease of creativity,” Myers notes. And he knows.

Jarecki edits in footage of the original “King Kong” to illustrate a performer trapped by fame, includes clips of Presley’s over-rehearsed “keep my opinions to myself” mantra (had to be The Colonel talking) as Jones wonders how different the world might have been had Presley walked with Martin Luther King Jr., just once, or turned up at the “I Have Dream” speech in D.C. (with legions of other celebrities). It might have risked his celebrity, but might have reflected more of who he really was.

We can’t know, the film suggests. We cannot ever know what it was like to, as a late Elvis hit posited, “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”

“He had it all,” songwriter Mary Gauthier declares, “and he had more of it than anybody had ever had.”

Just like America. And the film argues that just like Elvis, America is stuck in the past, living in “the politics of nostalgia.” Bloated, unable to make the smart decision when faced with the easier, expedient one, unwilling to speak out when the need to speak out was never greater, drug addicted, lost and fat — and not just in the rural Trump-centric places that still worship Elvis, either.

It’s the American Dream we mourn when we focus our mind and not just our heart and ears on Elvis, the opportunities of the country a country boy like him came up in.

Jarecki’s film, his most thoughtful and oracular, had so many interviews and so many musicians that many you see on its IMDB page didn’t make the final cut. Frankly, I’d have lost Baldwin and Myers and a couple of others to get at one guy who hasn’t just followed Elvis, studied Elvis and gone through the dark side of fame with Elvis. Nicolas Cage, who married Elvis’ daughter, would have been a real coup and added something important to an already important, wonderfully-crafted argument and film.

But what’s here is enough, a stand-out documentary in a year already littered with glittering, delightful titles.

It’ll be on PBS at some point, but don’t wait. Seeing it in a cinema has a hint of religious experience about it.

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Elvis Presley, Eugene Jarecki, Ethan Hawke, Emmylou Harris, Chuck D, John Hiatt, Immortal Technique, Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by Eugene Jarecki, script by Eugene Jarecki and Christopher St. John. A Oscilloscope release.

Running time: 1:48

Netflix has decided that what the romantic comedy genre needs is another “THIS time I get it RIGHT” fantasy farce, this one starring Adam Devine.

“When We First Met” is built around a guy’s grief  over losing Ms. Right, grief h recovers from by time traveling to earn that magic “reset.” And Devine? He gets to play his abrasive Jack Black Lite thing — singing, funny voices, more music, hapless around women, kind of a jerk.

Noah (Devine) met Avery (Alexandra Daddario of “Baywatch”) on Halloween three years ago. It was a star-crossed night, and he cannot stop thinking about it and drinking himself sick over it at an engagement party — hers. She’s marrying Ethan (Robbie Amell).

“Ethan has nothing on me.”

“He kinda does,” her BFF Carrie (Shelley Hennig, of “Ouija” and “Unfriended,” caustic and funny) says. “He’s like the nicest guy ever.”

“He’s like, ‘Mormon Nice.'”

It takes a bit more drinking, with Carrie and his Noah’s BFF Max (Andrew Bachelor) for the story to gain clarity. Noah and Avery met at a Halloween party. She was Geena Davis in “A League of Their Own.” He was Garth from “Wayne’s World.”

“The key to doing a really good Garth impression is to make your mouth into a tiny little butthole!”

They chat and chat and chat, “Do you like jazz?” “Do I like BREATHING?”  He gets her life story, she gets to hear him play piano at a jazz bar where he works. They even hit the photo booth. A Cookie Crisps binge, foosball and in the end of this adorable night to remember, she hits him with a “You’re cute.” Her “you’re cute” he turns into “this might’ve been.”

Can you say “Friend Zone?”

But when he wakes up, it’s the wrong day and year. It’s Halloween, 2014. Again. Before he can finish sprinting/singing “Goin’ back, back back in tiiiiime,” we realize what he’s really hoping for is “Groundhog Day,” a chance to manipulate events more to his advantage this time around.

So he does. So he’s got to get back to that photo booth. That first attempt at getting ahead of the game, knowing all the right things to say to this stranger still dressed in her “League” uniform, has him changing costumes, learning a Count Basie tune to impress her, etc.

He replays the phone booth game…hard.

Will this turn things to his advantage, let Noah skip past “the friend zone” this time around? What’s your best guess?

“STALKER!”

As bad as things were, they can only get worse. But if you like seeing Adam Devine get pummelled, well you know where to go.

He wakes up with another shot, just like “Groundhog Day.” What does Noah have to “learn” over the course of these assorted attempts to be the sort of “guy Avery wants to be with?”

I’ve seen “Groundhog Day” recently, so I appreciated the attempted journey from whiney and self-absorbed to jerk to kindness, from Garth in “Wayne’s World” to James Bond to…

Devine wanly attempts a played-out drunk scene, and even though I’ve never found him more than irritating in “Pitch Perfect,” “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” or the grating “Game Over, Man,” he performs this variation on “Groundhog’s” journey of personal discovery with verve.

Alternate futures with business success (but no more jazz), as a douchebag version of himself or a plump sell-out workaholic variation at least hold the attention. It’s still not really all that funny, I have to say. Except for discovering that he’s fluent in Chinese in one of these variations. The “I guess I DON’T know how to play the piano” version isn’t even close to amusing.

Why do people go to weddings or engagement parties of lovers/crushes they never got over? It seems to happen a lot…in the movies. There’s much more than just that in “When We First Met” that has the ring of the familiar, that reminds us we’re seeing an inferior unfunnier copy.

Devine, like Adam Sandler, has hitched his cinematic wagon to Netflix, and they have done likewise with him. But as ready as the Jack Black comparison (musical, plump, tries too hard) might be, it’s only mean because it’s accurate.

He’s less irritating here, a little charm shows through, which doesn’t save the movie but gives it a perfectly sweet aftertaste.

And even if you don’t review movies for a living you should know where this is going right around the midway point. If not, you’re sentenced to spend a weekend on Netflix, watching “Groundhog Day” and “Before I Fall” and maybe “It’s a Wonderful Life,” for good measure.

MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Adam Devine, Alexandra Daddario, Shelley Hennig, Robbie Amell, Andrew Bachelor

Credits:Directed by Ari Sandel, script by John Whittington. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38

As I was sitting down to check out a Netflix comedy (“Win it All”), largely on the strength of the fact that Jake Johnson was in it, I had an epiphany.

Jake is, to me, hilarious, even in bad movies (“Let’s Be Cops”) or middling ones (“Tag”). I’ve been a fan since oh, at least “Safety Not Guaranteed,” maybe earlier.

And he looks like Oscar Isaac. More than a little bit, to be blunt. Yeah, they’re both Jewish (Jake Johnson Weinberger), both favor the stubble thing. I’m a big Oscar Isaac fan, too.

But Oscar Isaac, versatile singer, brooder, action hero (meh) that he may be, is not naturally funny. The whimsy’s not there. He’s supposed to be swaggering, swash-buckling in the “Star Wars” universe. Those are inherently funny characteristics.

And he’s not getting it done. He’s not alone in that regard, not laying the limp biscuit these movies are at his feet. But he’s illustrative of the problem.

Oscar and Jake look enough alike that my mind went, “What if they swapped Jake for Oscar in the future ‘Star Wars’ main storyline?” Just as a thought exercise.

Because if there’s one thing most of us seem to agree on, it’s that lighter touch that the Abrams-spawned films lack. And nowhere is that more evident than in the casting.

Go back to the original George Lucas films. Who’d he cast? “American Graffiti” bit-player who could do deadpan Harrison Ford. Mark Hamill, straight off a TV sitcom.

Carrie Fisher, daughter of a great screen comedienne and “Shampoo” comic vamp.

Alec Guinness, a serious actor whose career featured a dazzling array of comic masterpieces.

Abrams? He went for Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and so on. Fine actors, or in some cases, fine enough. The light touch? None of them have it.

Donnie Yen of “Rogue One” is funnier than everybody in all the other films, including the “Solo” sequel, put together. Diego Luna was the closest we’ll see to that lovable rogue Ford turned Han Solo into.

Alden Ehrenreich’s comic chops were fine in “Hail, Caesar!” Kind of playing a “type” there, broad and cornpone. He’s not the least bit funny in “Solo,” nor is Ms. “Game of Thrones” or Donald Glover. Glover’s funniest as his rap alter ego, Childish Gambino, he landed some laughs on “SNL,” and he has the best potential to work out as a young Lando. But not funny enough in the movie.

Which probably won’t spawn its own sequel.

Maybe finding actors with a known light touch should be added to all the demographic check-boxes Abrams & Co. are plainly using when assembling these Disney products. More Jake Johnsons, less Oscar Isaacs.

It’s a sentimental father-daughter comedy about being left at the altar and on a drunken whim, taking Dad on the honeymoon cruise you were going on and meeting Seth Rogen on board.

Yeah, it’s a nightmare.

Kelsey Grammer tries to make us forget his Nugent/Voight/Hannity issues, Bell plays another disrespected and put upon cute blonde and Rogen is her –what? Barstool confessor?

It’s a Netflix film, which means it might have not been worth releasing theatrically, but everybody got a paid vacation. And it might be funny. Hard to tell.

This trailer is a reminder that you’re not under any obligation to give away ANY of the plot to your movie in the trailer for it. “Daddy Issues,” which premieres at LA’s OutFest, serves up impressionistic sketches of a love triangle in a bubblegum colored fantasia that I’m going to call, “Lesbiana.”

Intriguing, but we’ll have to see if there’s more to it than pretty faces, nude bodies and flirty come-ons.

“True crime” documentaries usually stick to a formula — depict the crime, then show the investigation and if there was a solution, how the investigation came out.

But what if you’re not absolutely certain there was a crime? There is no physical evidence, no murder victim’s body, no dead-certain suspect and no motive?

Try making a film out of that. Better still, try building a case “Out of Thin Air.”

That’s just what is depicted in the British-produced documentary of that title, a tale of young people convicted of murders based on a single piece of the evidence puzzle — confessions.

No, this isn’t another movie about the “West Memphis Three.” It’s set in monocultural, ethnically pure and thinly-populated Iceland just a couple of years after it had the world’s attention by hosting the Fischer/Spassky chess match. And perhaps the one object lesson the story the film tells has for other Western democracies is, “if this could happen there, it could happen anywhere.”

In 1974, a young man doesn’t come home from a night of bar hopping and partying. It’s the dead of Icelandic winter, but search parties head out into the frozen lavascape that is this remote and forbidding island, searching in vain for some sign of him.

Did Guðmundur pass out and tumble into a crack in the Earth, fall into the sea? Or did something more sinister happen?

The police focused on where he went, who last saw him, as we’d expect. They can find nobody with a motive for the crime, even though there’s this one suspicious fellow with an Eastern European name, Sæv­ar Marinó Ciesi­elski, who gets their attention.

Nothing comes of that.

Six months later, winter’s back, and an older man, a father, Geirfinnur, disappears even more mysteriously. Vast search parties, more poking around in snow and lava fields, on beaches — nothing. But they remember this foreign guy, and people who partied with him. They’re especially interested in  Erla Bolla­dótt­ir, his Icelandic girlfriend, pregnant with his child.

Months of investigating, endless interrogations of those two, and others who knew them, the revelation that Erla and Sæv­ar had been defrauding the phone company out of large sums of cash, and the cops are sure they have their quarries. Because outside of the investigation, the case is being tried in the equally insular world of Icelandic media. Leaks, revelations, the whole island — where everybody is related — is sure this “gang” did it.

Exhaustive investigations are replaced with exhaustive trials. Still no bodies, evidence of crimes, murder weapons or motives. But if you hold the floor in court long enough…

Now, forty years later, people are finally having their doubts.

Dylan Howitt’s film recreates the “crimes,” or recreates the police recreations of the crimes. He interviews cops, journalists, a memory expert and those who knew the missing men as well as the survivors among the six people accused and convicted of their murder.

“Out of Thin Air” is on its most solid ground pounding home the notion that “memory,” as Erla says, “is such a” fragile, strange thing. It can be manipulated, tricked and twisted by those determined to do it.

Interrogate somebody 180 times, for hundreds of hours, park them in solitary confinement for days and weeks on end to “concentrate” and try to remember details you’re suggesting to them, they just might confess to whatever you put in front of them.

“Out of Thin Air” cannot quite summon up the gossipy atmosphere — alleging governmental involvement, conspiracy and cover-up — the “public hysteria” for a resolution to these cases in what is “kind of a hobbit society.”

Frustratingly, Howitt makes little attempt to recreate the lives of the victims or re-investigate the disappearances. The movie feels incomplete, as indeed the police case still does.

Instead, he focuses on the jaw-dropping case coerced and constructed out of arrests, releases, re-arrests and years of interrogations and incarceration, turning lover against lover, using this coerced conviction to keep people in jail while that coerced conviction is trumped up and added to it.

It sounds like justice in China, not a Western European democracy. And it literally could happen anywhere in which blind justice is worse than blind, and a compliant public believes what they’re told to believe instead of what common sense is putting right in front of their face.

Sometimes, that coup de grace in any case, the fixture of many a police procedural and boilerplate courtroom drama, the “confession,” is the most worthless evidence of all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, descriptions of murder, drug abuse

Credits:Directed by Dylan Howitt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:24