Movie Nation

The films of Ira Sachs always send me to the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) to remind me of his credits.

Because “an artist,” the old saying goes, “hammers the same nail over and over again.”

Knowing he did the quietly charming “Love is Strange” as well as “Keep the Lights On” and “The Delta,” character studies with a minimum of motivating incidents and gay texts or subtexts, is a help in figuring out what he’s getting at.

And I have to go to IMDb every time because, to be blunt, the films are that forgettable.

“Little Men” is an 85 minute Brooklyn melodrama about two artistically-inclined teen boys and the rental dispute between their families that threatens their friendship.

The kids are engagingly written, complicated in a quickly sketched-out way. Theo Taplitz plays Jake, the budding painter whose parents (Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Ehle) just inherited the husband’s father’s apartment, and the storefront where aspiring actor Tony (Michael Barbieri) sometimes helps out his seamstress mom (Paulina Garcia). She is a Chilean immigrant, separated from her absent husband, who has long had a dress shop there.

Leonor (Garcia) hasn’t seen an increase in rent in forever. And under-employed and pushing-50 actor Brian (Kinnear) is being pressured by his sister (Talia Balsam) to get more rent — a lot more. Brian’s moved his family into his father’s apartment, which means his therapist wife (Ehle) isn’t their sole means of support.

That move is how Tony met Jake. They bond in an instant the way kids do, and before the summer is out, they’re plotting joint admission to an arts-oriented magnet school.

But every time Brian brings up rent, Leonor (“Leo”) lashes out, about how he wasn’t a good son, about how his father considered her his “real” family, about how Brian was such a disappointment to his father.

Brian, being played by the moist-eyed Kinnear, is on the verge of tears after every discussion. Wife Kathy announces she’s trained in conflict resolution, but she gets nowhere with Leo, who runs down their family, in Spanish, to the old family friend (Alfred Molina) who checks in on her.

Meanwhile, the boys get along great, even if they face the odd blast of teen taunting, often with a homophobic bent.

“Tony has a new BOYfriend!”

Sachs includes a long, funny scene in Tony’s summer acting workshop, and nothing of a parallel nature for Jake, who plainly has a crush on Tony, who just as plainly is interested in girls.

The kids stand out, Kinnear has added “haggard” to his gang-dog persona as he’s aged, and the saddest scenes here might be Brian taking on Chekhov’s “The Seagull” for a non-profit theater company, a job that pays little and will lead nowhere, and he knows it.

Ehle has too little to do, with Garcia (“Gloria,” “The 33”) having the chewy scenes — flashes of bitterness and helplessness.

But “Little Men” doesn’t come to grips with much of anything, leaving relationships and questions of sexuality and even Leonor’s uncertain future uncertain.

It’s a collection of scenes, vignettes and character sketches, Life in Brooklyn with a hint of melodrama. Realistic enough, compelling in the mildest sense, it’s just not all that interesting.

Which is why I’ll be tracking down Sachs’ credits the next time he gets something on the big screen. I’ll have forgotten this one as well.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic elements, smoking and some language

Cast: Theo Taplitz, Michael Barbieri, Paulina Garcia, Greg Kinnear, Jennifer Ehle, Alfred Molina
Credits: Directed by Ira Sachs, script by Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:25

The great Werner Herzog is the cinema’s most curious filmmaker, and his probing camera and soft spot for eccentrics make this (fiction) feature filmmaker’s documentaries stand alone.

His wide-ranging intellectual inquisitiveness is well-served in “”Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World,” in which the 73 year-old child of World War II marvels at the revolutionary changes of the Internet Age.

Change and the speed of change is what this is all about. It’s a bit all over the place, but it’s a rewarding, thought-provoking ride, which is expected every time Herzog commits to a subject.

“Lo and Behold” is a movie that starts with a history of the Internet. He visits ‘Net pioneer and enthusiast Leonard Kleinrock (top photo) in the UCLA lab where the Internet was born, in 1969.

The first communication between computers was with a lab at Stanford. They were just logging in when both ends of the conversation experience the world’s first Web Crash. they meant to type “Log In.” They only got “Lo.”

If you don’t think Kleinrock and then Herzog will lap up that word “Lo” and the wonders it foretells, then you don’t know Herzog. “Wonder” should be the man’s first name. “Behold” could be his middle one.

“Lo and Behold” wanders into Elon Musk’s office for a chat about the web future that will aid our colonizing Mars and hangs with scientists pioneering self-driving car technology (which Musk’s company is putting on the road). The “hive mind” of the web is producing cancer research and bolstering the hunt for alien life. Herzog visits robot labs and loner Web philosophers, an astronomer or two and the town of Green Bank, West Virginia, where the presence of a super-sensitive radio telescope means there are no cell phones or cell towers and not much in the way of Internet, either.

Herzog asks if one and all if they think “the Internet dreams of itself”?

And dark prophet that he is, Herzog finds a California family assaulted online with photos of their daughter, “nearly decapitated” in a car accident — photos thoughtlessly taken by a first responder who callously passed them on by email to friends, not suspecting the unspeakable cruelty of the anonymous Groupthink of the WWW.

Herzog is drawn to wise madmen, from the actors he uses in his feature films (Klaus Kinski, Nicolas Cage, Christian Bale) to the odd ducks he stumbles across making documentaries (“Grizzly Man,” “Encounters at the End of the World“). He finds a few here, including famed hacker Kevin Mitnick.

These are miraculous days, Herzog enthuses, a time when communication has never been faster nor more widespread and available to nearly all. But as he and the disparate voices he listens to warn us, it’s time to stop and consider it all, the degrees of privacy we must insist on, the unspoken perils of turning so many jobs and so much of our thinking over to machines “which can learn” exponentially faster than the fastest human mind.

If we’re going to keep a Herzogian sense of wonder, maybe we ought to start thinking about what comes after this moment of “reverie.”

“Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World.”

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language and some thematic elements

Cast: Kevin Mitnick, Leonard Kleinrock, Lucianne Walkowicz, and the voice of Werner Herzog
Credits: Written and directed by Werner Herzog. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:31

Those “Ab Fab” Brits, Edina and Patsy, are back — decades past their TV glory, more decades beyond their expiration dates in “Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie.”

If it can be drunk, smoked or snorted, they consume it. Because even at an age when Keith Richards feels the need to moderate, they’re as decadent as ever, darlings.

Jennifer Saunders’ riotous 1990s TV lampoon of London fashion, overage excess and social climbing in the shallowest end of the pop culture pool still packs a comic sting, largely thanks to the evergreen pairing of Saunders, as flailing and fading fashion publicist Edina Monsoon, and the fearless Joanna Lumley as Patsy, a fashion editor who walked every runway, smoked every cigarette, sucked every lime and shagged every rock star and actor who has crossed her path since the 1960s.

How’s she do it?

“Fetus blood, baby.”

They leap on every fad, try every diet and live their lives in a frantic imitation of those whose world they live in, if only peripherally. And they still call everybody “Sweetie, darling.”

Eddie is down to her last couple of miserable, overage clients, the pop singer Lulu and Spice Girl in dotage (Baby Space) Emma Bunton. The days when “the zeitgeist flowed though me” are over. She is finally, for the first time in her 60some-odder-than-odd years, facing her mortality.

She’s written — Ok, DICTATED to her ditzy assistant Bubble (Jane Horrocks) — her autobiography. But the one editor who will read it is as blunt as they get.

“You think your life’s interesting. It isn’t. It may be worth living, but not worth reading.”

And she’s not having it, darlings.

If only she can land Kate Moss, whom rumor has it is changing publicists.

If only she can keep her still-around, even-more-aged mother (June Whitfield) out of her hair. If only she can keep her creditors at bay. If only her common-sense divorced daughter (Julia Sawalha, the ultimate “third wheel”) can let down her guard over her own underage but runway-ready daughter (Indeyarna Donaldson-Holness).

But Eddie knocks Moss, playing herself, into the Thames at riverside fashion function. All of Britain mourns and Eddie becomes the national pariah. If only she knew what a pariah was.

The jokes are broad and narrow as ever. It’s a very inside-baseball riff on fashion and fashionistas and always has been. As the cameos fly by — Jon Hamm to Sadie Frost, Stella McCartney to Jean-Paul Gaultier — you might miss the funniest and most obvious joke of all.

She’s pinning her comeback on Kate Moss?

Lumley, a not-quite-forgotten star of TV’s “The New Avengers” when the “Ab Fab” TV show turned her loose in the early ’90s, remains the Empress of Excess and would all but own the movie if writer-creator/co-star Saunders wasn’t so damned funny herself.

Patsy, pushing 70, has adapted. She flips through Tinder pages.

“Had him. Had him. Had him.”

She makes Jon Hamm blush, wears smeared lipstick and disheveled haute couture like combat medals. Lumley is, as ever, glorious in the part.

I’m not sure how this will play to anybody who doesn’t know the 1990s TV show, which only aired on cable in the U.S., and “ex Flower Children Behaving Badly” seems tailor made for the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” audience, as raunchy as it sometimes is. The slapstick is silly and slight, the cultural references (Jerry Hall sucking up all the TV interview time on the red carpet) pointedly dated.

But so many throw-away moments zing. Eddie dabbling with getting in shape by riding a Razor scooter to her waiting limo, for instance.

“Exercise, exercise, exercise, DONE” and that’s it.

Fans will find nostalgic fun in Eddie’s endless neediness, daughter Saffron’s pluck (Sawahla gets a show-stopping moment, looking for Mum in a drag queen bar), Patsy’s stoned slurrings and the return of Eddie’s equally-aged nemesis Claudia (Celia Imrie) and her harridan role model, the loud, profane working class high fashion taste-maker and troll before trolls were “in,” Magda (Kathy Burke).

So forget social mores, forget that the world has made “stars” out of a family of surgically enhanced sex tape tarts, and remember Patsy and Eddie’s were there first. In movies, as in new experiences, new fad diets, new things to buy, new spa treatments to indulge,  nouevelle cuisines or new banned substances to consume, do what they do.

“Just say YES, darlings.”

MPAA Rating: R for language including sexual references, and some drug use

Cast: Jennifer Saunders, Joanna Lumley, Julia Sawalha, Jon Hamm, Kate Moss, Chris Colfer, Jane Horrocks, Joan Collins, Lulu, Emma Bunton
Credits: Directed by Mandie Fletcher, script by Jennifer Saunders. A release.

Running time: 1:49

You don’t realize how much a good horror movie depends on acting until you stumble in that rare one whose cast actually gets it right.

We need to believe that the people up there on the screen  are shocked at what they’re seeing, mortified at their mortal danger. And in “Lights Out,” we do.

It’s an elemental thriller, a ghost story told in pools of light in deep darkness, with a child in peril and that moment when the child recognizes that crazy Mommy (Maria Bello) isn’t just talking to herself and won’t be any help at all with this boogey-girl haunting his nights.

“Did we wake you?”

And that little boy, Martin, played by Gabriel Bareman? He plays that kid scared out of his wits, shutting his door, afraid to turn the lights out. Because that’s when “Diana” will get him.

Teresa Palmer of “Warm Bodies” and “The Choice” plays Rebecca, the Goth half-sister who left home, it turns out, for the same reasons Martin comes knocking at her door. She has faint memories of being menaced by Diana. But can she keep Martin safe in her tiny apartment upstairs from a tattoo parlor? Will the pink neon “Tatoos” sign shining through the windows be enough to keep Diana at bay?

David F. Sandberg, remaking his own short film and working under horror impresario producer James Wan (“Insidious”) sets up the terror, the monster and the dilemma — nobody believes them — nicely. An opening scene puts Billie Burke (“Twilight”) in jeopardy, the missing “Dad” in all this, jump-starting a brisk 81 minute fright.

The magical talismans, if you know your “Morphology of a Folktale” ingredients, are well chosen — a hand-cranked generator/flashlight, candles, a cell-phone scene. Sound effects and jolts of music heighten the effects.

“Lights Out” loses its way at times. Things are over-explained, background material we might be curious about is fleshed in needlessly. Yes, it would have been a 75 minute movie (almost unheard of these days) without this filler. Does it really matter where this night terror came from?

But Bello, Bateman and Palmer more than give us fair value as their frights become out frights, and their dilemma has us wondering how bright out cell-phone light is, wondering if the flashlight in the glove compartment still has batteries that work, wondering how long we can go without sleeping.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for terror throughout, violence including disturbing images, some thematic material and brief drug content

Cast: Teresa Palmer, Gabriel Bateman, Maria Bello
Credits: Directed by David F. Sandberg, script by Eric Heisserer (screenplay), David F. Sandberg. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:21

OK, so the headier speculation about the rebooted “Ghostbusters” has created dashed hopes.

It won’t hit $50 million at the box office on its opening weekend, despite advance ticket sales that suggested it might.

It won’t really challenge a somewhat depleted “Secret Life of Pets” on its second weekend. “Pets” is underperforming by a smidge. It should have lost no more than 50% of its opening weekend audience, being a tiny tykes cartoon. And it did. It will hit $50 million. Maybe. It was off 60% Friday. Saturday will be the key.

So the distaff “Ghostbusters” speculation now turns to “Is $45 million (if indeed it maintains that pace) enough to warrant rebooting the whole franchise?”

The movie cost $144 million, after all. So opening at $45 means it’ll manage half that — if it is lucky — the second weekend, and fall off steeply after that. Maybe $100-$110 million in North American ticket sales. Those are “Angry Birds” numbers. Not great.

A flop? Not exactly. But close. A funnier screenplay would have helped, as they were already spending all that money on cast (NOT on the villain, NOT on the two current SNL starlets) and effects.

“The Infiltrator” opened Wed. and bombed. It will have $6 million in the bank by midnight Sunday, and that’s not enough to suggest Bryan Cranston should do anything other than prestige pictures (“Trumbo”) and cable.

This weekend’s box office should revolve around a second round of “The Secret Life of Pets.” It got decent enough reviews (I was in the minority not caring for it, but not in the TINY minority). It’s packed them in all week and could pull in another $50 million+ this weekend, per Box Office Guru.

But the real question mark is how much bang is there in a “Ghostbusters” reboot?

The Guru figures the distaff pseudo-scientists should curry $47 million from audiences. Not 3D, so besting a kiddie cartoon seems out of the question. “Pets” seems to have legs.

Decent enough reviews will help. It’s a safe PG-13, stars women and seems like a “safe space” of a movie because of that. How much of an audience there is for this proven brand is anybody’s guess. Pre-sales give it a shot at surpassing “Pets.”  Box Office Mojo guesses $46 million. guesses $46 million. 

Nobody is expecting much of anything from the Bryan Cranston undercover drug wars thriller “The Infiltrator.” It’s on a lot of screens, but looks to be lost in the flurry of “Ghostbuster” attentions. Maybe $4-6 million, the Guru and Box Office Mojo project. Cranston is getting a lot of movie attention for a cable TV star. That may wind down after this. His audience doesn’t go out. It watches TV.

So let’s read some polls — the Metacritic and Tomatometer ones — read some tea-leaves and read between the lines about what people are saying about this weekend’s potential blockbusters.

After that first trailer came out, the talk about “Ghostbusters” has been about how some “sexists” aren’t going to like it. That’s the narrative for this movie, thanks in part to the spin its director Paul Feig is giving it. Yeah, he was legitimately reacting to some extreme comments about the trailer (s). But the comments he was ignoring are the more telling ones.

Because the trailers told this one truth. It wasn’t very funny. The script doesn’t give a promising cast much to do, and if it wasn’t for Kate McKinnon’s trying ever-so-hard and Leslie Jones doing what Leslie Jones always does — teaching Tyler Perry how a REAL “Angry Black Woman” cliche acts — the leads would have landed none of the big laughs. Cameos by Dan A., Sigourney W., and Steve Higgins and Andy Garcia score. McCarthy? Not so much.

But cowed critics are giving the rebooted “Ghostbusters” a pass. Barely. So, fine. A Few laughs, a different feminine spin on the material, I hope it makes a lot of money and that maybe they spend some of it on better screenwriters if they make another. IF.

Then there’s the other wide release previewed for critics — “The Infiltrator.” It’s routine and generic and the cast is entirely too old, overall, in this “Miami Vice” era undercover drug bust drama. Most critics agree. But in reading those who raved about this mediocrity on Metacritic, I developed a theory. They’re the “Mostly, I just stay home and watch cable” crowd. Richard “Still Not a Real Movie Critic” Roeper single-handedly bent the Metacritic rating on this for a couple of days with his ringing endorsement. He’s shamelessly surfing the last few feet of America’s “Love that Bryan Cranston” wave. And he’s endorsing a dull movie.

Convicted felon and Conservative Pied Piper Dinesh D’Sousa has another “documentary” pandering to the “We hate Democrats” movie demographic. Not previewed, and it’s about Hillary Clinton. So people who mistrust foreigners and despite criminals will be led over the cliff by a race-baiting Indian with a prison record. Go figure. I’ll get to that one. Eventually.

Take away the overwhelming success of the good-not-great “Finding Dory,” the shocking opening of “The Secret Life of Pets” and the worldwide triumph of a middling “Captain America” installment, and this looks like the worst summer for summer movies in a generation. Bombs litter the landscape, little is worth having a conversation about and even the hate mail — over “Warcraft” or “Tarzan” — is half-hearted. Maybe late summer will produce some winners — “Suicide Squad,” maybe the “Bourne” sequel. No hope at all for “Star Trek.”

The new “Ghostbusters” is just different enough from the old “Ghost Busters” to be worth the trouble. Flipping the gender of the cast makes for an appreciably different take on the material, and the effects are 30 years bigger and better than most anything the 1084 film.

But watching it is a master class on screen comedy, what works and what just doesn’t. And the new film, whatever empowerment and role model virtues its creators talk up in going “Ghost Girls,” mainly doesn’t.

On paper, it’s a no-brainer. Bring in proven big screen comedy stars Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy and “Saturday Night Live” comics Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones to replace 1984’s “SNL” alumni Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd, and Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Easy laughs, right?

Beloved as it is, the original film was a scruffy goof that got by on swagger and cynicism. Those guys, playing academic frauds — some of them, anyway — were more surprised than anybody else when they started seeing real ghosts, catching them and removing them for profit. Insults flew, men flirted with women out of their league and profane catch-phrases were proferred.

The conflict is upended, here. Men are the ones doubting these women can get a dirty job done. The cynicism is gone, or conferred on those doubting males. The swagger is gone. The women hug and affirm each other and avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

But are there big laughs in victimhood?

The first thing McCarthy’s paranormal scientist says upon seeing a real female ghost for the first time is tell her how beautiful she is. Her best running gag is a Chinese restaurant that cheats her out of her wontons.

Well, OK.

The result is a “Men are from Venus, Women from Mars” disconnect at the film’s core. Throw in the two hour run time — almost no funny one-liners and limited appeal (special effect) sight gags — and this recycling is more wearying than surprising or amusing.

Wiig plays a put-upon and lovelorn Columbia physics professor angling for tenure. Working against her, aside from an incompetent command of Spanish? This book about the paranormal she wrote with a college pal years before. Her dean (Charles Dance) is not amused when the book, and that past, pop back up.

Because Dr. Gilbert has regretfully reconnected with that former colleague, Abbey Yates (McCarthy) and Abbey’s new partner, tech-nerd Jillian Holtzmann (McKinnon) at a fifth rate college where their research is “supported” across town.

Supported until their bird-flipping dean (Jimmy Fallon sidekick Steve Higgins, funny) realizes they’re still funded, and cuts them off.

Just when New York needs them, the city’s only “real” paranormal investigating academics are out of work. Somebody is summoning the undead back from “the other side.” So the ladies set up shop over a Chinese restaurant, hire a Himbo receptionist (a very ditzy Chris Hemsworth) and are joined by a subway employee (Jones) who has seen a ghost her own self.

If only they can figure out what to call themselves.

Director Paul Feig has found his niche making comedies starring women (“Bridesmaids”), and he puts effort into servicing every star here.

McKinnon does a variation of the quirky/flirty sexually ambiguous “SNL” characters she’s played and tries her hand at Dan Aykroyd/Harold Ramis style technical mumbo jumbo in describing the ghost grenades, ghost guns and “ghost chipper” her character invents at will. She’s no Aykroyd. She mugs during her close-ups but takes extra care to not upstage her castmates in group shots.

Wiig plays yet another shrinking violet who needs to find her confidence among her peers in A Man’s World. Her best go-to move is going all girly/giggly at the gorgeous dope they’ve hired as their receptionist.

Jones strains to deliver her share of “on up in here” or “down here” cliches.

“Man, it smells like burnt bologna and regret down here!”

That leaves McCarthy to play, well, the straight man. What a waste.

The script, by Feig and veteran “Madtv/The Heat” writer Kate Dippold, allows room for a sea of cameos with precious little that’s funny for any of the stars, or the “guest stars” to say.

It doesn’t give much away to say that Bill Murray has never been less funny in a comedy, and that the only real surprise here is that Andy Garcia, playing a “Let’s keep this ‘ghost’ business under wraps” mayor, lands maybe the film’s biggest laugh with a “Jaws” reference.

They weren’t going to make Murray, still playing a cynic/skeptic, the villain. But they needed to do better than “SNL’s” Neil Casey, playing the nerd who summons the afterlife to empower his bullied, disregarded hotel janitor existence.

There was an uproar when the first trailer for this movie dropped and the criticism turned sexist and nasty. But that doesn’t excuse what was pretty obvious, way back then. It wasn’t funny, promising a movie that wasn’t funny. The re-imagined “Ghostbusters” was never going to be anything more than a note-by-note remake, without enough laughs to sustain it.

And if all you’ve got to brag about is how inclusive and empowering to little girls your comedy might be, you’ve totally missed the point.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for supernatural action and some crude humor

Cast: Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones, Chris Hemsworth, Andy Garcia
Credits: Directed by Paul Feig, script by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, based on the 1984 comedy “Ghost Busters”. A Sony/Columbia release.

Running time: 1:56

We know there’s this dust-up between George Takei, the original Sulu, and screenwriter/actor Simon Pegg, who outed the new Sulu in the new film. Zachary “Mr. Spock” Quinto, out and proud, has weighed in. 

We know that Justin Lin, whose directing credits don’t inspire awe — in anyone — was behind the camera.

But otherwise, “Star Trek: Beyond,” the finale in this “trilogy” of the franchise, is as silent as space itself.

It opens next week. And a quick poll of critic friends across the country reveals, no word yet on preview screenings. I’ve got previews of “Absolutely Fabulous” and “Lights Out,” “Cafe Society” and “Captain Fantastic” and the like.

And I’ve made direct inquiries of Paramount. Silence.

UPDATED: I am hearing now that the option that the studio is floating is seeing it at the end of the marathon Trekathon theaters are showing Wed., July 20. Which is better than no preview at all, but hardly a ringing endorsement of what they think they’re releasing. 

I sit in a theater, an audience of one for “Our Kind of Traitor,” and I ponder something producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald said about Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson when “The Island” came out back in 2005.

They aren’t “superstars,” they said. Movie stars? Maybe. But neither could open a picture, then, and that sci-fi thriller bombed. A decade later, Johansson can open a movie (“Lucy”) and is something of a superstar.

McGregor? As I said, I’m in the theater, all alone.

McGregor makes interesting choices and has the same boyish screen presence he’s always had. But he can’t make people show up for “Salmon Fishing in the Yemen” or “Miles Ahead” or “Son of a Gun.” And they should. His movies are invariably smart, with “Our Kind of Traitor” fitting that description to a T.

If you’re making an espionage picture, you can’t go far wrong signing on to a John LeCarre adaptation. Even if you’re casting McGregor — as a leery but easily bullied college professor sucked into the role of passing a message from a Russian money-launderer about a corrupt British politician to British intelligence — a bit on-the-nose.

And even if the movie itself is a bit of a far-fetched tease, like its opening scene, a sex-interrupted idyll featuring nudity. McGregor and James Bond’s latest Miss Moneypenny, Naomie Harris, play a couple trying to mend a busted marriage in Marrakech, of all places. That’s where Perry, a “professor of poetics,” meets Dima, a gregarious Russian (Is there no other type?) who bullies, taunts and tempts Perry into lurid, sordid parties with his hard-drinking Russian pals and assorted strippers and hookers.

Perry tries to be a good boy. Gail (Harris) is off taking business calls. But the hooker says what people have always said about Ewan McGregor.

“You’re so pretty.” “So are you.”

It’s a trite melodramatic convention that husband and wife are insistently forced into the company of the Russian, but seeing as how he’s played by Stellan Skarsgard, we get it. We’re leery, as are Gail and Perry. He seems secretive, scary, maybe. But he’s so all-embracing, so full of cliched Russian love-of-life (and a sloppy drunk Russkie accent), how could they resist?

But he’s picked them for something sensitive, passing on a tip contained on a memory stick. It could implicate a British government minister, which would tickle this certain MI-6 agent (Damien Lewis), if not the politician (Jeremy Northam) himself. The struggling couple must make their way through Europe, past operatives from both sides who may mean them harm.

There’s a color palette to LeCarre’s world of spooks and “Whitehall Mandarins,” the higher-ups pulling the strings, and “Our Kind of Traitor” nails it, even in the sun-baked backroads of Morocco, or the garishly-lit evenings. Gun-metal blues and autumnal yellows I always associate with his books are more in evidence as the couple dashes across Europe.

And Skarsgard makes for an unforgettable character, a shambling, rich wreck covered in tattoos, loving the good life while it lasts, but a man with a photographic memory and a mission. Which McGregor and Harris, a most believable couple, must haplessly carry out as Lewis, all pursed-lips and clipped, Hugo Weaving in “V for Vendetta” cadences, urges them to do.

The intrigues are rather routine in ways that point out that perhaps the director of a “Nanny McPhee” movie wasn’t the best choice for this. But McGregor, Harris, Skarsgard and Lewis give fair value and give this the lived-in feel of even the most far-fetched LeCarre plots.

Even if there isn’t a “superstar” in the lot.

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

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Naomie Harris, Stellan Skarsgard, Damien Lewis, Jeremy Northam
Credits: Directed by Susanna White, script by Hossein Amini, based on the John LeCarre novel. A Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:47