Movie Nation

“Love, Divided” is a pleasant-enough love-without-first-sight rom-com about two quarelling neighbors who find a connection through a shared wall, one that’s entirely too thin to get the sound muffling job done.

He, played by Fernando Guallar, is borderline agoraphobic, a tinkerer/game-builder who hasn’t left his apartment in three years. Something set David off, and he’s been obsessing over getting his next game just right, any excuse to not go out.

The new neighbor (Spanish pop star Aitana) “won’t make it through the day,” David predicts to his pal, Nacho (Adam Jezieriski). David has his ways — sound effects gear, noisy machinery, etc. — to chase off anyone who might disturb his peace by moving into the place next door.

He doesn’t need that other neighbor Valentina asks about “the noise” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) telling her it’s a “ghost.” Couldn’t hurt, though.

She’s a pianist rehearsing for a big audition. Mr. “I require absolute silence” and “Challenge, accepted” and his metallic racket may be getting into an escalation he’s not mentally prepared for.

But a truce is quickly reached, conversations grow more pleasant and her Beethoven audition piece muddles along. Her overbearing ex Oscar (Miguel Ángel Muñoz) may still be in the picture, but she takes a stab at figuring out who the sensitive stranger next door is. That requires conferring with her cousin/bestie Carmen (Natalia Rodríguez) while David copes with the “get out of the house” efforts of Nacho.

Can love be in the offing, or is an old non-soundproofed wall enough to stand in their way? Not having to face or get too close to someone could be “perfect, just the way it is.” Or is it?

It’s a little dispiriting to watch Alex Garland’s idea of what America’s next “Civil War” will look like, and the documentary “Bad Faith” on the same weekend.

The first is about effect, and the second, subtitled “Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” a point-by-point examination of the steps and the people who schemed, fund-raised, wrote-manifestos and enflamed and misled a fanatical minority to put us there.

Like other films covering similar ground (last winter’s doc “God & Country”), filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones — they collaborated on the “Hollywood Masters” interview series — set out to define “Christian Nationalism,” the political movement that “privileges Christianity” “over all other faiths” and seeks power to impose that view on others.

And they trace the modern version of this KKK-born movement’s birth back to the days when activist/zealot Paul Weyrich found, in abortion, the proper smokescreen issue to enlist ardent Protestant segregationists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and whichever Bob Jones was presiding over the founder of Bob Jones U.’s white supremacist preacher’s college into Republican politics in the 1970s.

“Bad Faith” features academics, pastors, authors and Russell Moore, the courageously outspoken editor of “Christianity Today,” in detailing the history, agenda and assorted manifestos of billionaire-funded right-wing “think tanks,” data banks and “rage baiting” organizations, from the Council for National Policy and Koch Foundation to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Turning Point USA, ALEC and The Heritage Foundation.

Their latest manifesto could be their Final Solution for ending American democracy and majority rule — Project 2025.

A “Calvinist” view of Christianity is at the heart of it, some suggest, the idea that the wealthy pastors of the Falwell, Robertson, Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen variety were “chosen” to be made rich by the Almighty, and thus worthy of being donated to and followed right to the ballot box.

Enlist and coopt them, and you’ve got a virulent one-issue voting bloc.

But who do a lot of those preachers follow? “Bad Faith” takes us back to the way Weyrich and others figured out that connecting this manipulated minority to Big Money and the issues Big Money people support — cutting or eliminating corporate tax rates, attacking estate taxes and lowering taxation on the rich.

The fact that the Hunts, the Kochs and many others were oil and coal barons isn’t even played up. But who denies climate change and who benefits from their electoral denial of scientific fact?

The film’s most troubling footage is of the violence of the January 6 insurrection, with grim images of the assault on police, the nation’s capital and democracy itself interspersed with images of the combatants, urged into “war” by thousands of conservative pastors and others, carrying Jesus wearing a MAGA hat posters, wearing crucifixes and waving Trump flags.

Steve McQueen got his big break in landing the lead in the late ’50s bounty hunter Western “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” And that translated into his first quality, name-recognition movie roles.

He is the ostensible lead in the ensemble thriller “The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery,” a by-the-numbers heist picture co-directed by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, father of Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim.

That explains the natural light, almost made-for-TV black and white look of this genre picture, a tale told with competent lighting, uncomplicated camera set-ups and a story that was a tad old hat, even for its day.

But McQueen shimmers with real star power, working that contemplative, let-us-see-the-wheels turn style that set him apart from most of his peers (not Newman) and set him up for stardom.

The whole icon of cool thing would come later, after “Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape,” “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “Bullitt.”

McQueen plays a college kid who shows up for the gang meet-up in his letter jacket. But George isn’t in college any more. Something to do with a woman. And that woman’s brother, Gino (David Clarke) is the one who set him up for this job.

He’s to be the driver in a bank heist, with 60something John (Craham Denton) the brains of the outfit, always pushing around his demoted wheelman Willie (James Dukas), with Gino an antsy gunman anxious to make a score so’s he can pay off his lawyer.

Twenty thousand bucks? Each? Or to split? They’re “not messing with the vault,” just “the cash drawers,” John growls. They’ll spend five days casing the joint. They’ve already got the three cars they’ll need for the robbery and the get away.

George? He’s new, “green,” and insistent that driving is “all I’m gonna do.” As his abrupt hiring, on Gino’s word, creates friction, John tests him by making him steal license plates for a getaway car.

“I ain’t no petty thief” protests be damned, that’s what he ends up doing — haplessly.

When Gino insists George hit up his ex, Gino’s sister (Molly McCarthy), for spending money, the “punk” kid draws the line again, and again to no avail.

“Look George, this ain’t the university. You’ve got to do some things you don’t like.”

But Ann, invited out, sizes George and the situation up pretty quickly. As John barked to the other three “No WOMEN,” right from the start, George has got problems. With the day of the bank rob closing in, those problems put the whole heist in jeopardy.

Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” outing takes us to snowy, remote region we outsiders used to call Lapland (Sápmi, is preferred by the locals), that treeline on the edge of the tundra in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and a bit of Russia. It is the home of the Sámi peoples, traditional reindeer herders who have lived in this cold place for thousands of years.

That makes for a striking setting for “Stolen,” a seriously basic, if satisfying, thriller about the challenges this “outsider” group faces in the modern world. Adapted from a novel by  Sámi journalist and novelist Ann-Helen Laestadius, it comes to the screen as a somewhat violent melodrama in the “Witness” mold.

We meet the Sámi, a tiny population clinging to an almost prehistoric lifestyle in their traditional homeland. We see the beauty of the reindeer herds, galloping through the snow, meet a family from a small village, herding them with snowmobiles and griping about “changes” in the climate that make their lives harder.

And now there’s somebody killing reindeer and burning their feed.

An enthusiastic little girl, Elsa (Risten-Alida Siri Skum) gets her first reindeer, which she names and ear-marks and whispers the traditional Sámi incantation into that ear, “I don’t own you. I only have you on loan.” But shortly after that, she sees it have its throat slit by a local goon with a grudge against the Sámi. He makes a throat-slashing gesture to Elsa to keep her mouth shut. Which she does, even when she sees this creep in the station as her father (Magnus Kuhmunen) files yet another pointless police report.

No wonder the cops won’t do anything. Anybody who isn’t Sámi resents them, their government protections, their say over what happens to “their” grazing land.

So you’ve got a misunderstood and shunned outsider culture under deadly threat from a guy cozy with the cops. And a child is the only “Witness.”

But the Laestadius novel and the film adapted from it quickly shakes off any resemblence to the 1985 Peter Weir film as Elsa grows up to become a teacher ((Elin Oskal) in the village school. With her culture and family facing even more pressures — more attacks on their herds, more threats to their land, which may have iron ore beneath it — Elsa has grown up to be outspoken, unusual for a woman in this tradiational patriarchy.

Elsa has kept her secret about the animal-torturing and butchering Robert (Martin Wallström). Speaking out, badgering the cops, with her family seeing the threat and their own people shunning her warnings about it, something’s got to give.

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is brutal, unblinking and myopic, a sour taste of what a “real” civil war in the industrialized, armed-to-the-teeth United States might look like.

Garland, the thoughtful and thought-provoking auteur behind “Ex Machina,” “Annihilation” and “Men,” makes a smart and sobering political thriller that brushes past “how we got here” — because we’re seeing that literally every day in these Disunited States. He makes an attempt at playing this civil war tale as “apolitical,” but clues are there if you watch and listen.

He lightly touches on the Big Picture and instead shows us the brutality of war the way most of those caught in the middle of a conflict experience it — personal, limited to what we can see on the horizon and what we’re facing close at hand. The firefights are either just down the road, or just across the parking lot.

Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a visit from a tank, an armored Humvee or a helicopter gunship. “Bad guys” and “good guys” fall, battle lines are blurred along with everything else shrouded in “the fog of war.” All noncombatants are, when the smoke clears, is “collateral damage.

It’s sometimes riveting, almost wrenching at others and kind of depressing. And it generally succeeds in its main mission, de-romanticizing “civil war” and “secession,” words that the glib, the rural, old-enough-to-know-better low-information voter types and their leaders throw around.

Kirsten Dunst grimly plays a veteran conflict photographer wearing the “thousand yard stare” of someone who’s seen it all, and a tad too often to let it impact her.

“Every time I survived a war zone — and got the photo — I thought I was sending a warning home. ‘Don’t DO this.’ But here we are.”

Photographer Lee works with reporter Joel (Wagner Maura of “The Gray Man” and TV’s “Narcos”), and they’re about to embark on a trip to Washington, D.C., crossing through lines where “We work for Reuters” is just another way they could get killed. It “don’t sound American.”

But that’s where they’re headed, hoping for a chance to interview and photograph the “third term” president (Nick Offerman, playing it straight) whom we’ve seen rehearsing his spin on a “great victory” announcement and the hyperbole that accompanied it.

All his talk about offering the “secession states” of the “Florida Alliance” and “Western Forces” (Texas and California) a chance to cease hostilities, we gather, was propaganda. Joel and Lee want to get to D.C. before the rebel forces close in on the United States Army and Secret Service et al defending that city and this sitting president.

We’ve seen the way these reporters and photographers hurl themselves into danger, walking into a New York riot as it begins, getting entirely too close to firefights when they break out. Lee must have some notion of the bullets that don’t have her name on them. Yellow vests and “press” helmets and passes aren’t bullet proof.

A kid (Cailee Spaeney) who calls herself 23 and could pass for 15, who shoots on celluloid film because her dad did, fangirls over Lee. But Joel is the one she talks into letting her ride along to Washington, by way of Western Pennsylvania and Charlottesville (“the front lines”). As Lee has allowed aged, hobbled New York Times reporter Stephen (the regal Stephen McKinley Henderson) to ride in their “Press” marked Ford Excursion, fair is fair.

Lee’s motherly-without-being-a-mother objections set up the back-and-forth with Jessie the kid about how hard-nosed you have to be to do this job.  Heartless enough to photograph “me if I get shot,” Jessie wants to know?

In a dozen other movies, a line like that counts as foreshadowing.

On their trek they will stumble into a sniper situation, a mass grave and the scary soldiers (Jesse Plemons, aka Mr. Kirsten Dunst plays the scariest) filling it. They will banter with other press, grit their teeth over those “embedded” with one side or the other and face combat between regular and irregular forces, grimly documented by black and white still shots by our photographers.

Torture and summary executions long ago returned to warfare of the “civil war” variety. Hating “the other,” obsessing about guns, violence and the death penalty will do that to a people.

Little details enrich their odyssey. “Canadian” money is more valuable when you’re trying to score gas from assault-rifle-armed convenience store commandos. Rural folks, near and far, have found an excuse to “keep away” from all that and carry on some semblence of normal life.

Is Garland making an ironic comment on the “rural white rage” that is driving much of this Trumpist rhetoric? Big talkers want to start a civil war, and then sit it out?

But the discerning cinephile will want to see it in IMAX . Here we go.

Spoiler alert, it is Maria Menunos’ laugh that triggers the national rift that cannot be mended 

Making any movie is like trying to paint and write, telling a story and sending a message, on the sides, roof and undercarriage of a moving train. Once that train has left the station, you’re kind of at the mercy of a lot of things you don’t control.

That is especially true of documentaries, where a tiny crew often signs on, devotes months and even years to capturing a piece of reality and the human experience, only to have “real life” and real events just blow up around you and ruin the planned film.

I’m not sure where in the process of documenting “Beyond the Raging Sea” filmmaker Marco Orsini (“Dinner at the No-Gos,” “The Reluctant Traveler”) got involved. My guess would be well after the events chronicled here. That kind of makes his collusion in this dubious enterprise all the more contemptible.

Two entitled young, cosmopolitan Egyptians — “seven peaks” climbed, “both poles” visited “extreme adventurer” Omar Samra, and professional triathlete Omar Nour — decided to train for and join a cross-Atlantic rowing race. They didn’t know how to row, didn’t have any experience at sea or the navigation or even survival skills required for such an undertaking.

It goes about the way you’d expect.

They say, in this documentary, that they were trying to “raise awareness about the plight” of Meditteranean refugees, desperate people who pay sketchy intermediaries to get them from Africa or the Middle East on boats that no one who knows boats and who wasn’t desperate would willingly board.

I’m not sure when these “bros” made the idiotic connection of their “adventure sport” and near-helpless refugees. There is nothing about “the cause” emblazened on their 7 meter (23 foot) blue water rowboat, with its DHL, whisky and O2 logos in plain sight. Wait — there it is, in teeny-tiny letters #rowing4refugees.

In any event, in “Beyond the Raging Sea,” their assertions and the film’s third act connections to “refugee” experiences comes off as tone deaf as a lifelong con artist comparing himself to Nelson Mandela. Yes, what they experienced was perilous. But it was SPONSORED peril.

We hear other rowers talk of the team’s disastrous “practice” rows, which end in with them requiring rescue. There is no film footage of that, just of these two practice rowing on the River Nile.

Eight days into their participation in a mass Canary Islands to the Americas race, their boat capsizes, something that happens to even the most experienced who attempt something that daunting. And again they require rescue.

We hear them relating this harrowing misadventure, with the more gregarious Nour “performing” their fears and struggles, aided by a little animation to flesh out the cascading cluster-felucca of things that went wrong. And there’s some footage of their actual rescue.

But bros, seriously. Here’s how you’re different from Sudanese, Ethiopians, Syrians, Kurds or whoever fleeing conflict, climate crisis-worsened droughts and the like. There was an entire team of concerned, paid professionals tracking you, redirecting help for your rescue, welcoming your survival.

Ask anybody in a camp in Greece, Spain, Cyprus or Italy how that compares to their experience of “those in peril on the sea.” Then hang your heads in shame and flee to the safety of your Everest-climbing, Iron Man in Hawaii community.

Every non-profit trying to aid refugees is desperate for attention, funds and public empathy. But anybody tying their cause to this film should check themselves.

And everybody who made “Beyond the Raging Sea” should run from this “credit” on their resume the rest of their entitled, tone-deaf lives.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Omar Nour, Omar Samra,

Credits: Directed by Marco Orsini, scripted by Frederick L. Greene and Marco Orsini. A Cinema Libre release.

Running time: 1:10

The stakes are higher, the set pieces grander and new heroes arrive, along with new villains, in “The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady,” the second half of the sprawling, brawling and fresh French take on Alexandre Dumas’ beloved novel.

Eva Green‘s ferocious version of the spy Milady de Winter steps center stage for this film, with Cardinal Richeliue (Eric Ruf) stepping into the background as more sinister figures are introduced, all striving the topple King Louis XIII (Louis Garrel), plunge France into religious civil war and make it easy pickings for those interfering Protestants, the Brits.

It’s hard to top Faye Dunaway’s delicious turn in the Milady role in the riotously entertaining Richard Lester “Musketeers” of the ’70s, but multi-lingual Green more than holds her own in the fights, the feints and the fury of a woman on a somewhat ill-defined mission to undo so much of what the menfolk have been scheming to bring to pass.

The assassination attempt that the Musketeers foiled in the climax to “Part I” has repercussions that extend in many directions. The Queen (Vicky Krieps) and her intrigues with the Duke of Buckingham (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) are in the clear. But others are still out there, plotting.

Young D’Artagnon (François Civil) might be engaged in the traitor-hunt thanks to his duties as a king’s musketeer. But the dastardly plotters have taken his beloved Constance (Lyna Khoudri) and made this personal. So of course brooding Athos (Vincent Cassel), dashing Aramis (Romain Duris) and burly hedonist Porthos (Pio Marmaï) are dragged in as they are separated, with all fated to meet again in a confrontation at the seaside fortress of La Rochelle.

A new count (Patrick Mille) figures in their plans.

“I am Henri de Talleyrand Perigord, Comte de Chevalier!”‘

“So many words, such a small person!”

There is no smack talk like 1627 French smack talk. And at every turn, there is Milady, slicing, stabbing, seducing and insulting.

“So handsome, and yet so stupid” (in French with English subtitles).

The swordfights are almost as furious as in the first film, just fewer in number. Her the emphasis is on set pieces, sweeping scenes of a city beseiged, a fleet engaged with a heroic artilleryman of noble birth, “Hannibal to my friends” (Ralph Amoussou) bringing a little diversity to this oft-told-tale.

Cassel and Green are the class of this cast, but there isn’t a false note acted or swashbuckled in front of the camera.

The pace is brisk enough to allow us to lose track of just who is allied with whom, and more than once. And the finale suggests that all involved don’t know when to drop the mike, take a bow and move on.

But Martin Bourboulon’s two films more than hold their own with Hollywood’s best versions of this classic cloak-and-swordplay mystery, preserving the surprises and adding a few fresh ones to iconic, noble-hearted “All for one, and one for all” heroics.

Rating: unrated, violence, seduction

Cast: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Pio Marmaï, Vicky Krieps, Louis Garrel, Lyna Khoudri, Ralph Amoussou, Eric Ruf, Marc Barbé and Eva Green.

Credits: Directed by Martin Bourboulon, scripted by Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:53

Don Siegel won a couple of Oscars for short films early on, did a lot of 1950s and ’60s TV, directed Elvis and John Wayne and the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” He was behind the camera for enough Clint Eastwood movies that he became Clint’s film school.

Hard boiled? You bet. “Dirty Harry,” “The Shootist,” “Charlie Varrick,” “Riot in Cell Block 11,” the guy turned-out a steady line-up of unsentimental, sometimes downright sadistic action.

“The Lineup” (1958) wasn’t one of his best, but it’s tough, brutal and kind of kinky, with a finish that packs a punch.

The idea behind it was, if the LAPD’s “Dragnet” could begin as a hit radio series, transition to a hit TV series and become a movie, why couldn’t the same thing happen with the San Francisco-based “The Lineup?”

A “taken from real case files” police procedural set in The City by the Bay, “The Lineup” featured fairly colorless cops — like “Dragnet” — chasing more colorful criminals than “Dragnet” ever managed.

Siegel’s workmanlike 1958 film takes us into a killing spree over drugs being smuggled into the city by tourists returning from Asia, and lets us see the pursuit through the eyes of the police chasing the killer, and inside the car with a door-to-door murderer-for-hire named Dancer, played with his usual relish by Eli Wallach.

Richard Jaeckel is the short blond punk assigned by The Man behind the scenes to drive our no-nonsense drug-retriever from destination to destination. And Robert Keith plays Julian, the demonic dandy correcting Dancer’s English usage and grammar, a misogynistic muse sitting on his shoulder urging him to collect “famous last words” from the poor saps he’s killing.

“For the book.”

Julian tells the driver who’s been sent to take them to the various unsuspecting “carriers” whom Dancer will collect from that the trigger man is “a wonderful, pure pathological study, a psychopath with no inhibitions.”

Julian seems to relish this. Julian is a Hollywood “type” all his own, the homocidal homosexual whose connection to Dancer isn’t so much homoerotic as sadistically co-dependent, a tough-talking but spineless sidekick with a fey obsession for mentoring in the social graces.

The first hint the cops have of drugs flooding into town this way comes when a San Francisco opera swell (Raymond Bailey) has his luggage grabbed in a handoff that gets a cop killed.

Bailey’s innate highborn shiftiness — he went on to player the banker Mr. Drysdale on “The Beverly Hillbillies” — makes him suspect one as Detectives Asher (Marshall Reed from the TV series) and Quine (Emile Meyer) start pulling together clues, visiting the 1950s medical examiner and tossing the cop killer’s apartment, so wrecked it looks a Halloween party got out of hand there.

“No self-respecting witch would bring a broom into this trap!”

Dancer and Julian roll into town and Dancer makes his demands on the wheelman brought in to work for them.

“I like my wheels stored in a prepared drop…I want my plates snatched not more than one hour before I move.”

Sure, those demands fall by the wayside. But a merchant seaman, a society swell and a mother and daughter have no idea who is about to pay them a “friendly visit.”

The direction is quick, cheap and unfussy, with Siegel forced to use low-heat TV actors as cops, early mornings for his exteriors and a lot of rear projection in the still-nerve-rattling chase scenes.

But he and the crew make great use of San Francisco locations, with the climax taking in the famous Sutro Museum and Skating Rink, and the elevated freeway, still under construction as the movie was being filmed, that would famously collapse during the 1989 World Series earthquake.

One thing that grabbed me right away was Siegel’s confidence that the camera could show you things dialogue and the lazy intertitles modern filmmakers use to set the scene. We can SEE it’s San Francisco. We don’t need to be spoon-fed that information.

Whatever the low-risk/pre-sold reasons for putting this TV-tailored tale on the screen, there’s no doubt Siegel went to school on the city and some of the Stirling Silliphant script’s sharper edges while making it. He’d return to the Bay Area several times in the future, most famously for “Dirty Harry” with Eastwood in 1971.

And even if that killer was to be even sicker than ever, this time, the sadist would be the fellow with the badge.

Rating: TV-14, violence, drug content

Cast: Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, Richard Jaeckel, Marshall Reed, Mary LaRoche, Emile Meyer, Raymond Bailey and Vaughan Taylor.

Credits: Directed by Don Siegel, scripted by Stirling Silliphant, based on the TV series created by Lawrence M. Klee. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:26

A bit of food, a dash of moonshine and a smattering of local color decorate “No Pressure,” a lackluster, lumbering Polish romantic comedy about finding love and life balance by leaving the big city for grandma’s farm.

Cinematographer turned director Bartosz Prokopowicz (“Chemo”) and screenwriters Karolina Frankowska and Katarzyna Golenia build this laugh-starved farce around a faked funeral, professional sabotage and mistaken identities used to trick Chef Oliwa (Anna Szymanczyk) into giving up her culinary life in Wroclaw for backward, pastoral Bodzki, in rural Podlachia.

Oliwa tells us in voice-over (in Polish, or dubbed into English) about her “hot temper.” But considering all she’s put through as she drops everything, begs for two days off from the boss, and gets her Mini stuck in the mud on the way to her beloved grandmother’s funeral, she maintains her cool.

Especially considering that grandma Halina (Anna Seniuk) pops up in her coffin and snaps “I had to find out if you were sad to see me go!”

That’s the sort of thing that only happens in rom-coms, Polish or otherwise, titled “Nic na Sile” or “No Pressure.”

When granny doubles-down after re-introducing lightly exasperated Oliwa to the farm by disappearing, leaving her career-woman granddaughter holding the bag, we’d expect more of a meltdown than Oliwa ever delivers.

After all, this is a busy time back at the restaurant, which is just about to expand. It was a hassle getting to “the literal middle of nowhere,” and part of that hassle was with this redhead (Mateusz Janicki) who blocked the one-lane bridge Oliwa was trying to cross, and who helps out on the farm. Supposedly this is Wojtek and not the herb grower Kuba who, with his father, are trying to get their hands on the farm and put Halina out of business.

Oliwa finds herself sucked back into this life and all this drama despite being furious at her conniving granny and granny’s paramour (Artur Barcis) and not being all that keen on the life lesson they’re trying to teach her.

“Sometimes, you’ve got to do something bad to do something good.”

Say what?

The colorful, cute neighbors aren’t all that colorful or cute. The mistaken identity thing is dragged out when aspiring pop-singer Wojtek — the real one (Filip Gulacz) returns and is enlisted in the scheme.

The Polish singing — pop, funeral dirge and folk — is a nice touch. But the misadventures with geese and goats and whatnot are weary tropes of the “back to the land/farm” comedy genre.

Like most every other element of the picture, it’s all been played before and played-out. So even if the stars had great, caustic chemistry — which they don’t — “No Pressure” was never going to surprise or delight .

And a comedy with no urgency, edge or stakes isn’t much of a comedy, with or without “pressure.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Anna Szymanczyk, Anna Seniuk, Mateusz Janicki, Artur Barcis and Filip Gurlacz.

Credits: Directed by Bartosz Prokopowicz, scripted by Karolina Frankowska and Katarzyna Golenia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52