Movie Nation

Jon Hamm gets his best big screen leading man role, and delivers, in “Beirut,” a smart, taut tale of Middle East intrigues from the screenwriter of “Michael Clayton” and the better “Bourne” movies.

It’s a period piece built around a diplomatic shaker and mover who loses it all, and who doesn’t seek redemption or deliverance, just a return to a life of relevance.

Mason Skiles is the guy on America’s Lebanese embassy staff who makes the deals, a nuts and bolts arbitrator with an eye for the big picture and an ear for the apt metaphor.

Lebanon, he says, is like a boarding house filled with Arabs, Christians, French, Syrians, tribes with “2000 years of revenge, blood feuds and vendettas.” The Palestinians pounded on the door, begging to be let in after Israel declared its independence and they were forced out.  All these boarders in their Lebanese home — Beirut was “The Paris of the Middle East” until the early 1970s — have reached a level of tolerance. But they’re shocked when their new tenants “just want to burn down the Israeli house next door.”‘

He tells this story at a 1972 party, with he and his wife entertaining the elite of Beirut and U.S. Congressmen. It’s a Beirut bubble of Cadillacs, congressmen and cocktails. And for Skiles, that bubble bursts in a hail of bullets and a burst of post-Munich Olympics terrorism.

Ten years later, he hits the bottle too much, the flask even more and sometimes can’t even make it back to the budget motel without dozing off at the wheel of his Ford Pinto. He’s arbitrating small company labor disputes, a broken widower with a head full of skills he’s wasting on union mugs and corporate thugs.

But he’s summoned. He’ll “guest lecture” at the American University of Beirut. “The Company” needs him to negotiate the release of an old friend and colleague. Only Mason will do.

This isn’t explained until he’s on the ground, picked up by an Agency attache (Rosamund Pike). The guy in charge (the formidable character actor Dean Norris) sugar coats the request — “Putting a skirt in front of a jet-lagged (and hungover) man your age” tends to get results, he chuckles.

Shea Whigham is the military man on the ground, trying to limit Skiles’ role to just the conversations the kidnappers have demanded he lead. They’re all worried that the Israelis are looking for an excuse to invade Lebanon and end years of artillery and rocket attacks by the PLO.

Everybody’s motives are suspect.

It takes just one grim, blunt and blood-spattered meeting in a gutted, war-torn Beirut for Skiles to show his “particular skills.” Before self-help books put this on the cover, he’s a master of “getting to ‘yes.'”

“We’re just here to see if the market’s open,” he offers. Barking at him, saying “Out of the question” doesn’t rattle him. “Hypothetically, just for fun” he counters.

The CIA and military folk are taken aback. The Palestinians, Israelis and Embassy staff are knocked on their heels.

“You’re delusional,” he’s told.

“We’re in PLAY,” he barks back.

Who knew the mesmerizing ad-man of “Mad Men” would make a stellar peace broker?

Guilt, remorse, revenge, double-crosses and cover-ups play into Tony Gilroy’s tight script. And tradecraft, in spy parlance. Director Brad Anderson (“The Machinist,” “Transsiberian’) handles most of this with tension building mastery, though I will mention one quibble.

Characters scoot back and forth through factional sections of a city riven by artillery fire and snipers. And when they meet in the ruins of the “Paris of the Middle East,” inevitably, they’re standing in front of Peugeot or Renault headlights — a parade of sitting ducks scenes.

Hamm gives us everything we saw over the years-long run of “Mad Men” in an intricate, concise 110 minute movie — swagger, romance, hope and secrets, professional mastery and gutted personal oblivion.

Pike is her usual terrific, Whigham (“Boardwalk Empire”) perfectly non-plussed and Norris, Larry Pine (playing the ambassador), Alon Aboutboul (as a cagey Israeli) and Idir Chender (terrorist) are all first rate. 

There are no Bourne super-heroics, “surgical strikes” are a lie we haven’t been sold yet (it’s 1982 for much of the film) and no easy answers, just a grubby, clawing scramble back to status quo ante. Gilroy is no Le Carre and Anderson is no Scorsese, but this is a solid, thoroughly entertaining thriller.

Pity Bleecker Street has it. Chances are, nobody will see it. That studio couldn’t market a Marvel movie or merlot to a wino.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some violence and a brief nude image

Cast: Jon Hamm, Rosamund Pike, Shea Whigham, Mark Pellegrino, Dean Norris, Idir Chender

Credits:Directed by Brad Anderson, script by Tony Gilroy. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:49

There’s this lovely moment that Joe Manganiello gives us in the middle of all the mayhem of “Rampage.” He plays a badly-scarred battle-tested mercenary sent by corporate fascists to deal with a genetically “edited” wolf.

This beast is as big as a bus, teeth the size of motorcycles and spikes along its spine. Did I mention it can fly, too?

And Manganiello manfully gapes in shock and awe at the (digitally painted in) monster he is confronted with. He grimaces, locks and loads, and turns to face his fate.

He’s one of two actors who convince us that what they’re seeing and what we’re seeing is so extraordinary that their widened, panicked eyes cannot take it all in, their minds cannot process the horror they’re beholding. The other standout is the criminally under-employed Naomie Harris, playing a plucky scientist who registers “stunned” when she sees the giant wolfe, gigantic ape and epic alligator that her eyes behold.

They aren’t the stars, but they stand out in this pricey, bloody-minded B-movie on steroids, an intensely unlikeable picture despite being built around the almost-always likeable Dwayne Johnson. 

Neither Johnson nor another co-star, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, give too much thought to the vast beasts they’re facing off with. They’re too busy taking turns posturing, cracking bad one-liners and hamming it up, playing that lazy screenwriter’s favorite character — the “ex-Special Forces” soldier, this time turned animal loving primatologist, and friend to a sign-language speaking gorilla, George — and a government agent with a “Men in Black” suit accessorized with idiotic cowboy belt, boots, pearl-handled Colt and drawl.

“You know whut mah ol’granpappy useta say…”

Morgan, an interesting character actor whose career was revived by “The Walking Dead,” puts his big screen future back into a coma with this, his worst performance.

And Johnson? Sometimes, he lets you see it’s all about the Benjamins. And that’s not always when he’s having to share the screen with Vin Diesel.

A secret private corporation space station is torn to shreds by the genetic experiment subjects being tinkered with in a gruesome and heartless opening scene. The “pathogen” the corporate fascists in charge (Malin Akerman and Jake Lacy) were shooting for, “weaponized” genetics, tumbles back to Earth and infects wildlife.

And one of those creatures is pals with Davis Okoye (Johnson). George is a giant gentle ape with a gift for sign language and a passion for practical jokes. George is a big reason Davis prefers animals to people.

“They like you, they lick you. They don’t like you, they eat you.”

George starts to mutate from licking to eating.

Harris plays a scientist with some inside knowledge of why this is happening, Morgan is the Fed running roughshod over uncooperative witnesses and sedated monsters his bosses want to contain and study.

And Brad Peyton, director of Johnson’s now two worst movies since becoming a star (“San Andreas”) is the fellow put in charge of making this script-by-committee bomb-with-a-big-body-count make sense and keep us interested. He doesn’t seem to have cared about the faceless hundreds who die in this joyless jaunt. Why should his stars?

The whole affair lumbers forward like a giant gator in a big city headed towards some sort of “King Kong” vs. “Godzilla” finale, with Johnson showing a lot of teeth and just enough commitment to ensure that nobody has second thoughts about writing that even bigger “Jumanji 2” paycheck.

The whole thing is every bit as stupid as it looks.

I like the whole corporations are out to kill us message, though Akerman’s future as a villain seems limited. But it’s a movie where you cannot convince your eyes that most of what you’re seeing is real. Computer-generated creatures, tanks, boats and helicopters fill the screen, fake crashes and fake monsters climbing digital skyscrapers, all more impressive than convincing.

And you can’t even say that for the movie as a whole. It’s not convincing, not impressive, and after “Jumanji,” Johnson’s agents will probably never let him within a city block of Brad Peyton.

MPAA Rating:  PG-13 for sequences of violence, action and destruction, brief language, and crude gestures

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Malin Akerman, Joe Manganiello

Credits:Directed by Brad Petyton, script by Ryan Engle, Carlton Cuse, Ryan J. Condal and Adam Sztykiel. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:47

We Southerners do dearly delight in the aspirations, vexations and agitation of Outland actors taking their shots at Southern drawls.

We do. And after a lifetime of laughter and trepidation of the Foghorn — I say FOGHORN Leghornisms of the likes of Travolta and Keanu, Emma Stone, Dan Aykroyd and Anna Paquin among many, many others, I have taken a vow of tolerance.

If Michael Caine and Renee Zellweger and Nic Cage are going to treat Southern as Elizabethan English, well — I’m no longer takin’ the vapors over it. It’s funny and it is often meant to convey charm, politesse and chivalry.

So kudos for Rosario Dawson for not offending the ears, playing the title role in her normal streetwise city voice in the coming of age comedy “Krystal.”

But Nick Robinson, as the teen who falls for her, director William H. Macy, playing his stoner comparative religion professor Dad and Felicity Huffman as his drawling, long-suffering Mom? Many thanks for the chuckles, you all.

She Who Can Do No Errant Accent Kathy Bates, of course, gets a pass.

Here’s a tale of a lovesick teen, Taylor, who has achieved 18 virginal years of age despite suffering from PAT — Paroxysmal atrial tachycardia. His heart races out of control on occasion. Such as when he persuses Pop’s porn as an impressionable seven-year-old.

“Lassitude,” the patriarch says, will do its job of “lassoing the priapic pony of your sexuality.” In time.

But at 18, the drop-dead gorgeous woman who meets him on the beach gives him another episode. The emergency room doc (William Fichtner at his drollest) isn’t worried. Krystal kind of freaks.

And when the lad gets out, professes his crush, she is not having it but is kind enough not to dismiss his fragile heart outright.

Taylor, “Tay Tay” to his smart alec artist/brother (Grant Gustin), chases her to AA meetings, where he fakes addiction. He’s not scared off by her testimony.

“I did the stripper thing. I did the hooker thing. I did the heroin thing.”

And he’s not totally bummed out that she has an irritable wheelchair bound son just two years younger than him (Jacob Latimore, funny). Her drawling, smiling, happy-go-thuggy ex (T.I., hilarious)? He’s another matter. 

Macy, working from a seriously stereotypical script by Will Aldis, achieves a mild level of madcap, here and there. The world doesn’t need another movie where a matronly “Belle of the sunny Southern aphorism” (Bates) declares, “Some Southern boy has been readin’ too much FAULKNER!”

As if there WAS such a thing.

It’s quotable, as such movies inevitably endeavor to be.

Dawson is her sexy earthy self, Macy and his spouse Huffman have an effortless chemistry, and T.I., Bates, Latimore and Fichtner win laughs.

Young Robinson? Tolerable, as we say down here. The accent grates until he sort of forgets it. Putting all this voice-over narration (lazy filmmaking) on it merely highlights how he abandoned the drawl for much of the movie, only to rediscover it in post production.

Something about filming on location in South Carolina does that to Hollywood folk.

But never you mind all that. Let’s just say that this endeavor rises, heroically but effortlessly, to the level of middling without anybody breaking too much of a sweat.

It’ll barely last a minute in theaters, but maybe, with a mint julep or three, it’ll play passing fair on Netflix or some such.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, drug use, some nudity and brief sexuality

Cast: Nick Robinson, Rosario Dawson, William H. Macy, Kathy Bates, Jacob Latimore, T.I., Felicity Huffman, William Fichtner

Credits:Directed by William H. Macy, script by Will Aldis. A Great Point release.

Running time: 1:33

Exotic, iconic, commanding, gender-bending, the very model of sexy androgyny and disco decadence, Grace Jones has cast a broad shadow over popular culture in a career that’s ventured from fashion show runways to James Bond villains.

On the cusp of 70 (her birthday is in May), she still tours, still makes appearances, still greets her fans at the stage door.

“Would you ever do another movie?” one adoring acolyte blurts out while getting an autograph.

“My own!” she snaps, with an evil grin.

“Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami,” tells her story in her own words and in remembrances of friends and family. It takes her from concert stage to music video recording to backstage to “back home,” Spanish Town, Jamaica, where this preacher’s daughter got her start.

Editor and documentary filmmaker Sophie Fiennes (Ralph and Joseph’s sister) delivers the diva to her (mostly, but not entirely gay) fans in a nearly two-hour version of “My story,” catching her performing her hits, switching languages and accents the way she changes her look — “Going native now, darling.” — her persona and her vibe.

We see Jones drop the New York accent she acquired by growing up in Syracuse (from age 13) upon her return to Jamaica, catching up with producers she worked with in the past, family and friends she grew up with there and taking on a Jamaican patois when trying to charm them, or bawl out those who keep her waiting, act unprofessionally or show her up.

The film captures her making her most recent autobiographical, reggae-flavored confessional album. And we see her endure a dazzling French music video shoot of her famed disco “La Vie en Rose” cover. “Tacky,” she says of the set. “Bite the bullet,” she grins. “This is paying for my record.”

But a lady has her limits.

“This makes me look like a lesbian madam in a whorehouse!” she insists to the director, in fluent French. Can they re-shoot it without all the scantily clad chorines?

“We are visual artists,” she explains backstage. “We know what this looks like.” And later?

“You have to be a high-flying bitch, sometimes!”

She comes off as the very picture of glamour onstage — higher than high heels, stunning makeup, masks, singing “Slave to the Rhythm” while spinning a hula hoop.

Her influential image-builder, style consultant and the lover who gave her a son, Jean-Paul Goude catches up with her and gets a “You’re the one who made me weak in the knees” confession. Her mom sings at her brother’s church and we see where the call to perform came from, even if Grace rebelled against a strict “No open-toe shoes, no makeup” upbringing.

And offstage, there is one truly unguarded moment, out of makeup for a “champagne breakfast, confessing in an upstate New York accent that we never, ever hear.

“It’s a lonely life.”

It shortchanges her fashion runway years, doesn’t use archival footage of her peak years in music, fashion and movies. “Bloodlight and Bami” may be mostly for her most faithful fans, but it makes for an interesting, just-revealing-enough portrait for those who only know her from the image she’s created and the music that rarely made it out of the clubs, back in the day.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with some profanity

Cast: Grace Jones, Sly & Robbie, Jean-Paul Goude

Credits:Directed by Sophie Fiennes. A Kino Lorber/BBC Films release.

Running time: 1:55

If nothing else, the timing of “Chappaquiddick,” a film about a tragedy and the infamous scandal that spun out of it almost 50 years ago, seems odd.

Why this story, about a drunk driving accident that killed a pretty young woman in the car alone with a married, rising star U.S. Senator with that magical Kennedy surname, and why now?

But ducking into a matinee of it you see the cunning of Entertainment Studios chief Byron Allen, the former comic who has aimed his operation at niche pictures ranging in quality from “Hurricane Heist” and “Friend Request” to “47 Meters Down” and “Hostiles.” The audience I saw it with was entirely white and quite old.

Allen’s financed a film aimed at conservatives in need of a safe space at the cinemas where they can escape the tidal wave of TV news and its indictments, investigations and reminders of their very poor judgement.

Director John Curran, of “The Painted Veil” and “Stone,” and his screenwriters (one is Whit Stillman acting discovery Taylor Allen of “Metropolitan” and “Barcelona”) present a generally straightforward account of the Moon Landing Week (July, 1969) car wreck in which Ted Kennedy killed his passenger, professional campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne.

And if nothing else it’s to be praised for putting a face and person behind a name that history has bandied about like a political football for all these decades — Mary Jo Kopechne. Kate Mara, of the equally dynastic NFL franchise-owner Maras, shows Kopechne as an idealist, a professional, still broken up by the death of Bobby Kennedy the summer before, compassionate to the surviving Kennedy brother, Ted (Jason Clarke) who seems to shun the mantle his tyrannical dad (Bruce Dern) has put on him.

“Lead a serious life.”

The old man has had a stroke, but with three presidency-bound brothers dead before, Ted, the hard drinking, womanizing and callow youngest brother has a family brand to protect. He just doesn’t seem to want that, or welcome the “Kennedy ’72” talk one and all bandy about on this weekend of a small boat sailing regatta and Martha’s Vineyard reunion of the extended Kennedy family.

“Family,” as Ted describes it to the partiers at a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island (at the seaward end of Martha’s Vineyard), includes cousins like his lawyer “Joey will fix it” Gargan (Ed Helms), a like-minded state’s attorney (Jim Gaffigan) and “The Boiler Room Girls,” younger female campaign aides who flock to the Kennedy name like Elaine on that infamous “Seinfeld” episode.

Mara and Olivia Thirlby play two of those women, practical idealists whose professionalism trumps any hint of sexual opportunism that this reunion has had attached to it by conspiracy buffs, the film suggests.

“How’re your kids, Senator? How’s your WIFE?”

The accident happens after a lot of drinks and a heart to heart talk about expectations, burdens, grief and ideals. Nothing more. No wonder Fox News hasn’t been all over this one. Well, that and the fact that Producer Allen is a black man.

And as Kennedy has foretold, talking of “character” and the ways it is tested, it’s what happens after that Oldsmobile flips into Poncha Pond in the middle of the night that reveals his.

Kennedy, 37, was still lightly regarded by many insiders, still called “Teddy” by the likes of Ted Sorensen (Taylor Allen), veteran insider and family public relations strategist. Teddy’s closest pals, the lawyers played by funnymen Helms and Gaffigan, try to get the vacuum-sealed car doors open after the Senator staggers back to the party cottage. They direct him to do the right thing, row him across the bay to the mainland to report the crash to the police.

And that’s not what Kennedy, not-entirely-sober, certainly in shock and overwhelmed by the growing understanding of what this means to his career, does. He calls his old man, who can’t speak more than a word or two. His one word edict?

“Alibi!”

“Chappaquiddick” then becomes a master class on political spin, damage control and image management. Formidable character actor Clancy Brown (“The Shawshank Redemption”) is the the take-charge guy of the Ten Angry Spin Doctors summoned by Old Joe to “handle” this.

No, Brown doesn’t look anything like former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. But that’s a mere quibble compared to what we see presented as unvarnished fact in a movie that strays from that straight and narrow too often for its own good.

“Chappaquiddick” is more factual than “JFK,” less on-the-nose than “W,” on the sliding Oliver Stone scale of historical accuracy. There’s a lot we don’t actually know about the accident, and while the movie sometimes sensationalizes the grey areas, the fact that the Kennedy clan and the future “Lion of the Senate” saw to it that we will never know is undisputable.

As is the naked power play and value of family connections that we see as various “fixers” “get ahead of the story” in their efforts to “control the body,” bums’ rush the police investigation and prosecution and generally clear the ground for a Kennedy “comeback” before the poor woman even has her funeral.

This stuff is documented, and if anything alarms a country that has gullibly embraced political dynasties since its founding, it should be these scenes.

What works against “Chappaquiddick” is its lack of narrative drive, that drum I beat far too often — urgency. Curran is a slack filmmaker saddled with an ugly story, cynically told, and a generally unlikeable “hero.” Clarke, of “Winchester” and “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” is a reliable character actor without a lot of screen charisma. Here, he doesn’t even bother to master the Kennedy patrician Back Bay accent. He’s built up into a villain who hardly seems worthy of that label.

Clarke’s a leading man like Teddy was presidential timber. Not really.

The speculation about Kopechne’s manner of death tends towards the graphic and lurid, even if it’s fair game.

That makes for a movie that has quality and some value. It’s just not one you warm to. Even Helms, playing “the conscience” Teddy chooses to ignore, seems more a conservative construct than a real person.

We don’t know what we don’t know, Donald Rumsfeld famously said. But in this case, we know enough. Wandering into the unknowns doesn’t serve history or the film well enough to make “Chappaquiddick” anything more than cinematic escape for folks who don’t like the current history they’d rather avoid thinking about by going to the movies.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, disturbing images, some strong language, and historical smoking

Cast: Jason Clarke, Kate Mara, Ed Helms, Olivia Thirlby, Bruce Dern, Clancy Brown, Taylor Nichols, John Fiore

Credits:Directed by Michael Curran, script by Taylor Allen, Andrew Logan. An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:46

The best effects are often the simplest.

Especially in horror. Particularly in “Truth or Dare,” the latest spin on “It Follows,” the horror trope that you pass on your curse to somebody new just so you can survive.

Here, it’s that killer Joker Smile that victims see or paste on themselves as they’re playing “the game.” A little makeup or glue, a bit of lighting, an added dab of digital Satanic red in the eye — you’ve got yourself a murderous threat asking the life-or-death question, “Truth or Dare?”

Yeah, that’s pretty much ALL the team of writers and director Jeff Wadlow have going for them. But not every Dead Teenager movie can be “It Follows” or “Final Destination.”

Six college friends and a nerd tag-along spend spring break in Mexico. Cute “Miss Moral High Ground” Olivia (Lucy Hale of “Pretty Little Liars” and “Scream 4”), the one who’d rather be building houses for Habitat for Humanity, picks up a bearded, chivalrous stranger (Landon Liboiron) who suggests a little after-hours drinking at an abandoned mission church. 

Hey, why not play a little “Truth or Dare?” They start, and that’s when Carter the stranger is tasked with a truth that will change all their lives, and end most of them. He’s lured them there to take a curse off himself, or at least better his odds.

“Tell the truth or you die. Do the dare or you die. Refuse to play? You die!”

It’s not until they get back to school that they start seeing people smile that smile, hearing people make that murderous challenge. It takes minutes to get everybody on board, but once enough of them have had the visions, and one or two of them die, the rest team up to try and survive.

Olivia’s relationship with BFF Markie (Violett Beane of “The Flash” and “The Leftovers”) is strained. So much for their pledge, “Between you and the world, I choose you.”

A boy comes between them. Some survive their first challenge, others don’t. Count them down — seven, six, five, four…

That’s where the tedium sets in. The truths get more lame, the dares less creatively deadly. A gay kid (Hayden Szeto) has to confront his homophobic cop dad, and amazingly, that’s played out OFF camera. The feud between Markie and Olivia feels arbitrary and weak.

And still the movie goes on, grasping for a conclusion that feels as if it was workshopped in a college course — correspondence school maybe.

Such Blumhouse Horror productions have the most generic of casts, as if they think the audience won’t notice the undersold emotions, the failure to properly register shock when confronted with the supernatural.

That’s the difference between “A Quiet Place” and “Truth or Dare” kids — the kids. And the adults. They’re emotive, empathetic actors who reach out and connect with the viewer, at least in John Krasinski’s blockbuster.

Cut-rate horror like this, they’re just girls in revealing outfits and boys drooling after them — until the next coed gets killed. Preferably after her big make-out scene.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for violence and disturbing content, alcohol abuse, some sexuality, language and thematic material

Cast: Lucy Hale, Tyler Posey, Violett Beane, Sophia Ali, Landon Liboiron, Nolan Gerard Funk, Sam Lerner, Hayden Szeto

Credits:Directed by Jeff Wadlow, script by  Jillian Jacobs , Michael Reisz, Christopher Roach. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:40

There’s nothing like a dive deep into dull to get you off your “Why aren’t great directors still getting the chance to direct?” soap box.

Coppola disappears, Scorsese delivers a dog or three, Woody Allen’s last few pictures add embarrassment to his #MeToo shame, and damned if Wim Wenders doesn’t go out and make everybody remember how long ago “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire” were.

“Submergence” is a soapy, melodramatic romance in quiet greys and limp emotions. This adaptation of a connected-by-water romance by novelist J.M. Ledgard has petite Oscar winner Alicia Vikander attempting a coquettish scientist (She wears GLASSES! See? She’s smart!), and her Tom Cruise-sized physical match James McAvoy taking on one more hard-headed Scot, a spy trapped in Somalia remembering how they met and connected by the sea in Dieppe.

Wenders lets composer Fernando Velázquez (“The Impossible,” “The Orphanage”) drown us in strings as a cute courtship plays out between two mismatched but physically attracted strangers in an exclusive French resort. The Eric Dignam (“The Yellow Handkerchief,” “Denial”) script lets the comic banter drift toward oceanography and thoughts of death, and evasion.

“Are you a spy?”

“Oh, I get it. You want to pry.” 

What’s her favorite body of water?

“This, the Atlantic.” And his?

“The human body…well, it’s MOSTLY made of water.”

Bet he says that to all the scientists with glasses at whom he makes passes.

Dr. Dani has “waited years” for her shot at dipping down to the sea floor in Europe’s “Nautile” submersible. It’s just adorable and a comic that she feels the need to explain what that is.

“Is it yellow?” he interrupts, because he’s no dummy.

“Of COURSE it is!”

James More (McAvoy) is a water engineer, an expert for non-profits which want to bring water to the Sudan, say. Where, you know, terrorists, pirates and guys hell-bent on bombing the rest of the world back to their level hang out. Coincidence?

They recall their month-ago meeting in their parallel lives. She is readying for the dive, where if things go wrong, “I’d suffocate. I’d have a lot of time to think about things.” He has been taken prisoner by the terror cell he wanted to make contact with (Alexander Siddig is the doctor who forgot his Hippocratic Oath). Beatings and starvation ensue, with More improbably sticking to his cover story and its alleged “mission” past the point of absurdity.

“I realize I’ve never been lonely before,” she blurts out to colleague and confidant “Thumbs” ) Celyn Jones, a whimsical-wise Peter Falk from “Wings of Desire” figure.

He’s just resolving not to die in the desert, with his love at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

It’s all moody and quiet, moments of action or the threat of it interrupting the sheer tedium of a romance that never sparks. The two of them together just seem…logical.

Oh well. At least two heralded under-40 stars get to say, “I made a movie for Wim Wenders” once. Pity it’s a “Don’t Come Knocking/Everything Will Be Fine” Wenders pic, and not of the “Paris, Texas” era.

At least Mr. “Buena Vista Social Club” still makes attention-grabbing documentaries. Wenders’ “Pope Francis” picture is due out soon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Alicia Vikander, James McAvoy, Alexander Siddig, Celyn Jones

Credits:Directed by Wim Wenders, script by  Erin Dignam, based on the  J.M. Ledgard novel . A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:52

A pretty good cast consisting of two Oscar winners and two Oscar nominees withers on the vine, waiting for a first time director to get on with things in “Same Kind of Different as Me,” a faith-based drama of the “Every Homeless Person has a Story” variety.

Interminable? Pretty much. We’re given a prologue that sets up a story we figure out in advance. And we spend the rest of the movie waiting for the still-a-fine-actress Renee Zellweger’s character to die and for the raging homeless man (the noble Djimon Hounsou) to finish telling us the origins of his rage.

Spoiler alert? Not in the least. It’s teased in that “I’m writing a book” and “this house is broken” opening.

What’s also a given is that the heavy lifting here will be done by the always-on-the-edge-of-tears Greg Kinnear, perhaps well-suited for the faith based genre — he fakes sincere piety and concern well — but eternally, exhaustingly dull in this outing.

He plays a high-flying Dallas art dealer who cheats — on his wife, anyway. She (Zellweger) faces this news with spine and stoicism. I really liked her call-the-other-woman scene, novel in its approach, well-acted.

Her “fix” and “condition” for saving that marriage and bringing Ron back to the huge Texas house where they were raising their kids, is that Mr. Million Dollar Sales has to drive her in his vintage Mercedes to the soup kitchen where she volunteers.

He has to volunteer, too. And when she sees the “man in her dream,” a bat-armed crazy man named “Denver” (Hounsou), Ron’s job is to feed him, befriend him and heal him.

That means getting past the car window Denver smashes, the endless threats and always-scary eyes. That means hearing his story.

First-time writer, producer and director Michael Carney stages one static scene after another, plodding his way through this story built on the book Hall, Denver Moore and Lynn Vincent assembled from the odd intersection of the two men’s lives.

Its title — “Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together,” is more spoiler alert than any mere movie could be.

We are treated to the flashbacks of Denver’s awful childhood, the isolation of the share-cropping life in the Deep South, the source of the man’s rage against people in general, white people in particular.

Zellweger brings that lovely vulnerability that “Jerry Maguire” first introduced to the world. That she has altered her appearance in the years since doesn’t diminish the actress she is, even if this script is thin gruel for someone with her chops.

Hounsou makes Denver a vivid, flesh-and-blood person, but that again is no thanks to the script or the direction, which makes his flashbacks play agonizingly slow.

Jon Voight shows up as Ron’s racist drunk ultra-conservative daddy. The drunk part, at least, is a stretch for that ageing, wingnutty Oscar winner these days.

And Kinnear? He’s just what you’d expect, earnest, open-hearted. The thing is, it’s friction that makes drama, a journey that makes a story arc. Kinnear can’t seem to manage those these days. There’s no edge to this guy, who has to be a “Master of the Universe” hustler in his line of work in that part of the country. Even his “cheating” seems boring.

Getting a laugh out of Klan robes is easy, but Carney can’t quite land it. Earning tears from a terminal diagnosis on a cruel, hard life should take no effort at all.

Carney can’t manage that, either. A shorter, tighter picture would have subjected us to fewer flat scenes that only advance the plot in baby steps. Lose the opening and closing this is framed in and maybe the movie adds some urgency.

It begins and ends with the utterly enervated, drained and casting about for a book his character wants to write (he didn’t, it’s an “as told to” sort of tale) story frame. That makes the movie utterly reliant on sparks Kinnear doesn’t often provide in movies these days.

He can play bad. Watch “The Way Way Back” to see how well. As Hall had a handLetting the subject of the movie have a hand in the script is the best way I know how to rub all the failings, sharp edges and stuff of drama right off them. Jerks finding redemption make for interesting drama. It’s a pity Hall wouldn’t let himself be played that way.

This is just bland — as bland as only Greg Kinnear can make it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including some violence and language

Cast: Greg Kinnear Djimon Hounsou, Renee Zellweger, Jon Voight

Credits:Directed by Michael Carney, script by Michael Carney, Alexander Foard and Ron Hall, based on the Ron Hall/Denver Moore/Lynn Vincent book . A Pure Flix release.

Running time:

It’s not a great film, but I honestly don’t know how you can make a better movie about tennis than “Borg vs. McEnroe.” 

Here is the solitary combat, the stripped stage where glory or humiliation await, the mental toughness it takes to get up off the mat when the match and the crowd have turned against you. It’s the toughest solo sport out there that doesn’t involve a literal beatdown.

Yes, you could get a grand soap opera out of The Williams Sister Saga,” and who knows? Maybe there’s unspoken tragedy/backstage drama to assorted other great rivalries in the sport, past and present.

But Danish first-time feature director Janus Metz and unheralded screenwriter Ronnie Sandahl have done a fine job of getting into the skulls of two of the sport’s greatest head-cases and a storied rivalry born at Centre Court, Wimbledon.

It was 1980, when the rackets were made of wood and the players made of steel. And none was steelier than the icy blond rock star Bjorn Borg, played here by Sverrir Gudnason. On the court, he was the master baseliner, ripping passing shots by anyone who dared take the net against him, easily outlasting those who thought staying back and waiting for him to make a mistake was a better strategy. 

He was closing in on his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title. And all the brooding, ritualistic 24 year-old Swede could think about was losing. Nobody will remember that he won four in a row, he muses to his coach (Stellan Skarsgard plays Lennart Bergelin), “just that I lost the fifth one.”

John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf) is the latest upstart to challenge him, a brash and rude American even more brash and rude than the dominant player Borg himself unseated, Jimmy Conners (Tom Datnow, relegated to the background). He’s assaulted a “gentleman’s sport” with cursing, tantrums and tirades that rattle line judges, throw opponents off their game and infuriate spectators. “Super Brat,” as the Brits nicknamed him, is just 21. 

“If I beat Borg in the finals,” he cracks to reporters, “it’ll be very hard to boo me.”

But did you know that Borg started out just the same way, a racket-tossing tyro facing a ban, as a teen, from Swedish tennis, where guys like him didn’t fit into “a gentleman’s sport?”

That’s the back-story we see in this film, mostly seen from Borg’s point of view. Bjorn Borg’s own son Leo makes a compelling brat himself, playing his dad as a kid who lets his temper beat him when the other player can’t.

He used the range-reducing two-handed backhand because he was also a teen hockey player, and his family gave up trying to tame his on-court behavior earlier than you would have liked.

But onetime Swedish star Bergelin (the always estimable Skarsgard) sees the inner fire and figures he can direct the conflagration. His first lesson? A practice where every shot the punk takes gets called “out.” Yeah, he reacts just the way McEnroe did. But he’s got to get that under control.

McEnroe’s intensity is summed up in his British hotel room. He calls the front desk, gets some magic markers, and paints his walls with the Men’s Singles Draw, marking off who each of them has to get through to make their date with history, in the finals.

Borg broods, dials himself into his training rituals, contemplates “escape,” lies about his identity to strangers like a man who cannot handle the screaming groupies that come with fame and bristles at everyone who calls him “a machine.” No, he is “a volcano, keeping it all in.” McEnroe sees this.  His coach remembers it. His fiance (Tuva Novotny) frets that he’s bottled it up for too long.

Meanwhile, Johnny Mac is obsessing over pinball machines, partying with “Broadway” Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms, funny) and cutting the throat of his best friend on the tour, Peter Fleming (Scott Arthur).

On the court? Borg struggles against low seeds and McEnroe, whose nerves are more out in the open, gripes about English pigeons, curses umpires with the F-bombs TV audiences rarely heard and the infamous, “ExCUSE me? You cannot be SERIOUS!” which we did.

The final, with its soul-crushing passing shots, scorching, arcing serves and naked net-charging aggression, is pretty much what you’d hope for in a movie about this signal event in the sport. It’s not quite full speed, even with digital enhancements.

Skarsgard is one of the greatest character actors of his era and brings stoic pathos to the “those who can’t, coach” role. But Gudnason is the star here, and shoulders that responsibility about as well as Borg did.

Which leaves the movie to LaBeouf, who energizes scenes with his antic energy, his darting eyes prattle, letting us see that desire to be “the youngest ever” men’s singles champ and the deflating defeatism that sets in, only to be beaten back by sheer will and ego — the fear of being humiliated.

God help the LaBeouf haters out there, but this is a great performance.

There is suspense, even if you remember how the match turned out, in the surprising layers of back story and the touching coda.

There’s no blood on the mat, no referee counting down from eight. But “Borg vs. McEnroe” is a vivid reminder of the personal nature of this genteel combat sport, of a great rivalry and of a time when America, Sweden and the world were their most passionate about it.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, and some nudity

Cast: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgard, Tuva Novotny

Credits:Directed by Janus Metz, script by Ronnie Sandahl. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:47

John Krasinski knows where the horror is, and where the money is in “A Quiet Place,” and keeps the camera in tight on it.

It’s the faces registering the quaking fear, the shaken-to-their-marrow terror of his actors, who make this compact genre piece pay off. When you’re married to one of the great screen actresses of our time (Emily Blunt), have cast the wonderful Millicent Simmonds of “Wonderstuck” and aren’t bad on camera yourself, you build your thriller on close-ups, close-ups and silence.

Fingers rise to lips, eyes widen in alarm and the scream trying to leap out of your throat has to be suppressed at all cost when, as a tattered New York Post headline silently shouts, “It’s Sound!”

Here’s a horror movie that, like “Insidious,” recognizes the value in great acting, even in a sausage factory genre where that’s too often an afterthought. “A Quiet Place” is gripping, pulse-pounding and grimly satisfying “You are there” frights, jolts and pathos.

Eighty-nine days ago, something happened — the monsters came. And human civilization apparently ran out of time to adapt. The headlines Lee (Krasinski) posted on his market board are loaded with clues — headlines, “Stay Quiet — Stay Alive” — and questions.

“Weakness? “Armor?”

There’s no more back story than that. The Abbotts; Lee, Evelyn (Blunt) and their three kids (Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward) have become survivalists. Dad’s sanded every path they normally take, painted the spots on the wooden floors of their old farmhouse where the boards don’t creak.

They can grow their own food, raid the abandoned pharmacy in the nearby town for medicine, home school their kids and make their own entertainment — Monopoly, with the dice silently rolled on a blanket. And they can all speak sign language because older sister Regan (Simmonds) is deaf.

Their days are spent on silent chores, pasting newspapers on the walls for soundproofing, lighting the nightly signal fire to let the world know they’re still there.

Because the gigantic, lightning-quick preying mantis monsters are never more than a dropped dish, sneeze or slammed door away, ready to slash and slaughter with motives no human understands.

Think about that set-up for a minute, because screenwriters Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and Krasinski have. How can you keep children safe? How can you keep them quiet long enough to reach adulthood? Kids are clumsy, noisy and make mistakes. Discipline here is absorbed and self-motivated. It has to be.

How can a child who can’t hear the noise she makes or the rumbling approach of menace manage?

Krasinski finds the grace notes almost smothered by the endless dread of threat — a tender, earbuds shared husband-and-wife dance to Neil Young’s plaintive “Harvest Moon,” extreme close-ups that capture the tenderness the kids feel for each other and their parents, the deaf teen doing what teens everywhere do — rebelling.

The director co-star is formidable and heart-tugging here, but Blunt, as you might guess, will tear your heart out when she isn’t making you fear for her next too-loud breath.

The plot bears no more scrutiny than the average vampire, zombie, “last family alive”  aliens invade thriller.

But the sound design is Oscar-worthy. And the film’s striking reliance on visuals was emphasized to me as I saw it in one of those 4D motion-activated-seats multiplexes (a nuisance) in the Dutch Antilles, with Spanish subtitles translating the sign language. Do the Abbotts really need ASL? Do we need the subtitles to know what is happening and where this is going?

No. Bravura movie-making doesn’t need back story, spoon-fed exposition or endless conversations. We can guess how the old World War II adage “Loose lips sink ships” doomed our chatterbox, digitally-connected civilization.

“A Quiet Place” makes for an entertaining, nerve-rattling essay on what might save us, the power of connection and the symphony our environment provides when we give it the silence it begs for and so seldom gets.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for terror and some bloody images

Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe

Credits:Directed by John Krasinski, script by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and John Krasinski. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:31