Movie Review: Krap on a kracker? “Kraven the Hunter”

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Roger Moore

Aaron Taylor-Johnson gets gym-jacked one more time, Russell Crowe auditions for a future Ernest Hemingway at his burliest bio-pic and Alessadro Nivolla trots out the silliest supervillain voice since John Malkovich in “Rounders” for “Kraven the Hunter,” a misguided mess of a comic book adaptation.

As long as “Jonah Hex” is streaming somewhere, the phrase “Worst comic book movie ever” is retired. But this lifeless, perfunctory piffle, with some admittedly grand stuntwork and a whole lot of digital characters and critters, earns a piece of that label.

Worst. Origin story. Ever.

It’s about how an American-educated teen (Levi Miller), son of a shady, predatory Russian oligarch (Crowe, slingink a Stolichnaya vodka-ad accent, comrades) pays the price for daddy’s big game hunting obsession and ethos.

“Man ees ze only animal who should be dreaded!”

Learning “the joys of stalking” with the old man as they hunt a man-killing lion in Ghana, young Sergei is chewed up, and how, by the lion as he tries to protect his weak and meek brother Dmitri (Billy Barratt).

A tourist teen named Calypso (Diaana Babnicova) visiting her Ghanese conjure-woman relative intervenes with a Tarot (ish) card and a little magic potion to save the lad.

Sergei lives, and as he grows up to be a killer of killers, and poachers, he will be Kraven and Calypso will be a London lawyer fighting evil-doers through the courts and Dimi (Fred Hechinger) will be the same sniveling baby brother he always was, because he stayed behind with their cruel dad while Sergei Kravinoff went off the grid on family lands in Siberia, traveling hither and yon to foil foul play in progress.

We don’t see this “travel,” just a momentary hint of it. It’s one of the ways this J.C. Chandor (“All is Lost,” “Triple Frontier”) film seems downright half-assed. We don’t see anybody go from Turkey to Iceland to Wales or wherever else they filmed this. This makes the picture feel static.

Yes, once Johnson shows up the stunts turn spectacular and digitally-assisted as he heedlessly leaps, plunges and thrashes his way in a fresh effort to rescue his now-kidnapped brother. But the kid’s always been “good” at mocking Dad’s menacing voice. How do they manage that? They just dub Crowe’s growl into Hechinger’s mouth.

DeBose is not quite a bystander to the “plot,” such as it is, which involves a spurned partnership suitor (Nivola) who turns into an arch enemy and surgically-chemically enhanced monster, “Rhino” whose minions must be foiled and whose infallibility must be matched against the seemingly-indestructable Kraven.

Kraven tracks his quarry down. We don’t see this. We just hear variations of this exchange.

“How’d you find me?”

“I’m a hunter.”

As if that’s enough. Well, he sniffs occasionally. Great nose for…perfume.

There’s little in the way of humor, although threatening Kraven with a taser is lame enough to be insulting.

“Not enough volts!“

But the sniggering shades-of-Malkovich-in-“Rounders”voice veteran character player Nivola comes up with has to be my favorite light touch.

None of the above adds up to anything like a satisfying night out at the movies, with the “story” kind of jumping along between sequences that don’t really connect and the violence going so far as to have Kraven yank out a guy’s heart to throw and knock another bad guy down with.

“Kraven the Hunter’s” the empty hole where a real movie’s beating heart should have been.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott and Russell Crowe

Credits: Directed by J.C. Chandor, scripted by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, based on the Marvel comics. A Columbia Pictures release, in association with Marvel Entertainment.

Running time: 2:07

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Netflixable? A TSA agent is blackmailed into letting somebody’s “Carry-On” slide by

Posted on December 14, 2024 by Roger Moore

The “talking villain” is played by Jason Bateman. So as you might guess, he damned near talks us all to death.

The scenario is within the realm of possibilities, but juiced and dragged-out with so many eye-rolling “Hollywood” twists that it abandons that realm for “Oh come ON” laughs.

The hero, played by Taron Egerton, sprints through the bowels of LAX as if his life and the life of Ms. Out-of-his-league (Sofia Carson) depends on it. But we see “outs” that he might take, counter-measures he could end this whole unfolding disaster with, even in a state of panic.

The jovial, welcoming nature of TSA agents on a holiday weekend at one of America’s busiest airports is pure fantasy, even if the abusive travelers are on-the-nose accurate.

But at least the luggage inspection/x-ray line thriller “Carry-On” carries you along. It plays. Director Jaume Collet-Serra reminds us he handled the suspense of “The Commuter” and “Run All Night” well even as he never quite makes us forget the insufferable excess of “Jungle Cruise” and “Black Adam.”

“Rocket Man” Egerton is Ethan, a bored, clock-watching TSA agent who picks today of all days to try and please his airline operations wife (Carson) by stepping up and asking for more authority from his boss (Dean Norris).

But since it’s Christmas Eve, the “busiest travel day of the year,” that boss will let the never-makes-an-effort lump swap spots with a pal (Sinqua Walls) and “run the line,” monitoring the X-ray screen as passengers let him see through their luggage on their way in.

That would have to be the day when a mysterious blackmailer leaves an ear bud for Ethan, texts him to “put it in” and starts giving orders and making direct, pointed threats to Ethan and Nora if the TSA gatekeeper doesn’t do as he’s told.

“There’s people in control, and people who listen,” our venomous villain says. Ethan is the latter, and if he listens, Nora won’t die, he himself probably won’t die and something and someone that shouldn’t be on that particular plane will get through.

Our anonymous talker, working with the “Watcher” (Theo Rossi), has tapped into the airport’s security cams and into Ethan’s life and is manipulating his every move. He “reads” the 30 year-old, tossing in insulting asides about “your generation” while he’s at it. He’s constantly reminding the kid who failed his one shot at the police academy of his shortcomings, his laziness and his dilemma.

And then Ethan figures out who this all-knowing, every-angle-played villain is, a “traveler” in generic dark clothes and black baseball cap. His many efforts to slip a phone or smart watch text by this guy (Bateman) might have failed. But now, at least, Ethan knows who he is dealing with and the “reading” isn’t a one-way street.

Collet-Serra, working from a somewhat generic, credulity-straining T.J. Fixman script, shoots and cuts Ethan and the viewer into this fix, and then leads us through a few harrowing worst-choice dilemmas and even laughable “escapes” as “You TSA guys are a joke” scrambles to save his partner, his skin and maybe a jetliner full of passengers from the fate this conspiracy has cooked up for them.

Danielle Deadwyler ably plays a cop working her way from an underworld murder at a Christmas tree selling greenhouse towards LAX.

There’s always one co-worker in movies like this who announces to the hero that he’s “up to something” and that they’re “going to find out what.”

And the reason the phrase “movies like this” suits is that we’ve seen versions of this very sort of “blackmailed into doing something awful” thriller before. Even a couple directed by Jaume Collet-Serra. Both of them (“The Commuter,” “Non-Stop”) starred Liam Neeson.

“Carry-On” is on a par with those films, no better and not much worse, just a new variation on a theme. The “work the problem” puzzle-solving is a little lazier, more far-fetched in the latter acts. But the impact is the same.

This thriller begins at a crawl and finishes with a sprint. The foreshadowing is obvious even if the next twist rarely is. The early bargaining, “All you have to do is do nothing,” is more sinister than the sometimes satisfying mayhem to come.

And Bateman’s cool-headed, calculating creep just keeps talking and insulting, an “OK, boomer” Gen Xer asking for comeuppance from Gen Z. But as tough-talking Bateman is no Neeson when it comes to “getting physical” over 50, we shouldn’t get our hopes up that Mr. Snide Insults can back up all that talk when it’s go time.

Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity

Cast: Taron Egerton, Jason Bateman, Sofia Carson, Danielle Deadwyler, Sinqua Walls, Theo Rossi and Dean Norris

Credits: Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, scripted by T.J Fixman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:59

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Movie Preview: The offspring of killer Dermot Mulroney frets over “Like Father Like Son” warnings

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Roger Moore

Dylan Flashner stars in this Jan 31 release, the son of a murderer on death row (Mulroney).

Ariel Winter, Vivica A. Fox and Mayim Bialik (as a therapist) also star.

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Movie Preview: Christoph Waltz is the “Old Guy” clinging to a career he’s aged out of — Hit Man

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Roger Moore

Yes, another hit-man/hired-killer/”trigger-man” action comedy, this one with the Oscar winning Waltz as an AARP assassin.

“We’re going younger, across the board” is something no legitimate employer could get away with “announcing” in this day and age.

Lucy Liu and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son co-star, as the “handler” and the “kid” our aged murderer is to train to replace him.

The Avenue has this, so good luck finding it when it hits theaters Feb. 21.

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Netflixable? Jolie as Callas, “Maria,” a Diva at Death’s Door

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Maria” is an operatic bio-pic in every sense of the word. In director Pablo Larraín’s vision of “La Callas,” the diva’s diva Maria Callas, there is tragedy off-stage but serenity in the spotlight, an artist wholly prepared and fully immersed in performing her aria. Anjelina Jolie is magnetic and mesmerizing in the title role, as one would expect.

But “operatic” is limiting as well. This is very much a surface gloss of a biography, a melodrama without big emotions, one that leaves much of the “life” and the background that explained that life out.

One can see names in the credits for the IMDb listing of the film for characters and players/periods in her life that didn’t make the final cut of Larrain’s latest look — he directed “Jackie” and “Spencer” — at a famous, iconc, tragic and troubled twentieth century beauty.

But what one is left with is a gorgeous, quiet and tragic appreciation of Callas. It’s a fan’s film that plays as a somber deconstruction of her last week on Earth, with flashbacks to Onassis and the Kennedys, hallucinated interviews for a documentary “biography” and a doctor and household staff pleading with her to ease off on the prescription drugs that render her Jolie-“thin” and unable or unwilling to eat.

Callas didn’t go out to “eat,” late in life.

“Book me a table at a cafe where the waiters know who I am,” she tells her butler Ferruccio (Pierfrancesco Favino). “I’m in the mood for adulation.“

Years after her “retirement,” in her fifties and alone, the “adulation” is still there. Along with the occasional rude fan (an American) or callously invasive journalist.

Callas wants to “find out if” she still has “a voice.” So naturally, a pianist/rehearsal coach (Stephen Ashfield) and a Paris Opera House are at her beck and call. She can tackle arias that made her bel canto the most famous in the world.

But her great love, the Greco-Argentine oligarch Aristotle Onassis, has died. Her fragile performing state — “ill” and missing shows — has turned into retirement. A world which had been her oyster was closing in around her, shrinking.

Her butler, housekeeper (Alba Rohrwacher) and physician (Vincent Macaigne) fret over her weight, her health and her drug intake. Maria is visited by the bullying womanizer Onassis in her dreams. And she’s meeting with a film crew, she says, and a young interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

But the fellow’s name, “Mandrax,” lets us know this is all in her head. She’s talking to an empty seat, answering for her choices and her life to herself while strolling around Place de la Concorde. The drugs give her an alternate life, one she prefers to reality.

“I am happy with the theater behind my eyes.“

Jolie is regal in the title role, coifed, made-up and dressed to the nines, the very vision of the American born Greek soprano. This Callas has aged out of the volatile side of “temperamental,” at peace with her mental and physical state and the end game she is playing out.

There’s little contrast with the younger Callas that we see — married and pursued by the “short and ugly” and filthy-rich Onassis, boorishly flirted-with by an over-confident JFK (Caspar Phillipson). She’s reached the state of using her sister (Valeria Galino) to get the drugs her doctor won’t provide.

There was probably more about her background, the formative elements in Maria’s makeup, temperment and talent in scenes that did not make it onto the screen.

But in all honesty, “Maria” suffices in many of the ways that matter. We’re treated to a spot-on impersonation, sans accent, with that once-in-a-century voice digitally replacing Jolie’s first-ever singing role. We glimpse her world at her peak as we’re immersed in her world at the end.

We see a great artist, too exacting, demanding and easily bored to be “resting” on her laurels and fading into the shadows.

Greta Garbo’s “closing the door” on celebrity isn’t for everyone. Hemingway to Phyllis Hyman, Jean Seberg to Chris Cornell, emotionally fragile artists who see it all slipping away have often chosen a more abrupt exit.

But that “exit” points to the one serious flaw in Larraín’s film, based on a Steven Knight (“Dirty, Pretty Things” and TV’s “Peaky Blinders”) screenplay. We don’t weep at the tragedy of this life and its end. And the only ones who do on the screen are Maria’s poodles.

Rating: profanity, suggestions of substance abuse

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Valeria Golino

Credits: Directed by  Pablo Larraín, scripted by Steven Knight. A Netflix Release.

Running time: 2:03

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Movie Preview: After Society’s Collapse, a better-late-than-never sequel — “28 Years Later”

Posted on December 13, 2024 by Roger Moore

Cillian Murphy returns to the role that made his name, Danny Boyle returns to the “universe” that made him big box office.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes do the heavy lifting. Are we far enough removed from “The Walking Dead” to consider this cinematic consideration of the zombie apocalypse “fresh?”

June 20.

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Classic Film Review: An anti-war parable that became a landmark of Japanese cinema — “Ugetsu” (1953)

Posted on December 12, 2024 by Roger Moore

“The value of people and objects truly depends on their setting,” the potter Genjurô tells a noblewoman and patron at one point in the classic film “Ugetsu,” a Medieval fantasy based on the “Rain-Moon Tales” of 18th century writer Ueda Akinari.

That applies to some films, as well. “Ugetsu,” Kenji Mizoguchi’s cinematic black and white woodblock print of Japan’s feudal past, has been acknowledged as a classic pretty much since it made its way from Japan to the wider world in 1953-54.

Viewed today, it can be appreciated for the artistry of the images, with most exterior scenes shot near sunset, first scene to last, by “Rashomon” and “Yojimbo” cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. But as much we grasp the simple anti-war fable inherent in its narrative, taken from two stories by Akinari, we can only imagine the impact it had at the time of its release.

However it was received in Japan, viewed abroad this was a message the world wanted to hear from Japan. Viewed in close proximity to Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” and the early works by meditative master Yasujirô Ozu (“Tokyo Story”), it’s easy to see why Japanese films took the international cinematic cognosenti by storm in the early ’50s.

These were painterly parables that introduced the world to a culture recovering from ruin, and often used symbolism and evocative tales from the past to make socio-historical commentaries on Japanese society to make their “statements.”

“Ugetsu” is a 16th century period piece set during a feudal society’s firearms-and-swords civil wars, a film highlighting the allure of war to opportunists and dead-enders looking for a quick path to riches, and its horrible cost to women, children and the society they live in.

Two brothers-in-law set their minds to change their impoverished, tiny village fates as war breaks out.

Masayuki Mori of “Rashomon” is the accomplished potter Genjurô, who cannot wait to hustle his latest batches of prized pots, vases and plates to the market in the city nearby. He’s cashing in as people spend in anticipation of the hard times to come, frantically keeping his kiln lit, even as marauding, looting, enslaving and raping soldiers come storming in.

He will leave wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and their little boy behind for that one last score before the fighting overruns them.

His sister Ohama’s (Mitsuko Mito) husband Tôbei (Eitarô Ozawa) is a failing farmer who’d rather try his luck at becoming a samurai. Being poor and ignobly born, there’s fat chance of that. But if he can round up some armor and a sword, maybe he’ll get his foot in the door as a foot soldier for the local lord’s corps.

Both men are warned about illusion in the short-term gains they seek by their elders, and about leaving their wives by those wives and by those same elders.

“Don’t let them get your women!”

The brothers-in-law are heedless — one driven by silver, the other by combat glory and the promise of profit from that.

They learn terrible lessons as Genjurô falls under the spell of a flattering noblewoman (Machiko Kyô) and Tôbei steals and stumbles his way to status in the military. But their left-behind wives are the ones to pay the highest price.

Arresting images abound, such as the boat passage across a foggy lake, their last symbolic and literal “warning” of the path they’re taking. Some scenes take on a fairytale quality, summoning up memories of Jean Cocteau’s glorious 1946 “Beauty and the Beast.”

But the earliest post-war Japanese films to make it to the rest of the wider world were, to a one, distinctly Japanese, faintly familiar in their universal themes, yet alien to Western cultures. As our main impressions of Japan were dominated by cut-rate export goods, the often-barbaric militarism of the “empire” just vanquished, and a quaint, somewhat racist Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, one can only imagine the culture shock of it all.

“Quaint” comes to mind watching the recently restored “Ugetsu” today, a film that stands apart from its Hollywood and European contemporaries, but doesn’t dazzle as much as perhaps it once did. “Rashomon” looks and feels more “timeless,” while the messaging from this “message movie” seems more watered-down over time.

That said, it’s still a lovely artifact, a striking morality tale best appreciated for its role in making Japanese cinema “mainstream” on the international stage, and firing the imaginations of generations of filmmakers to follow them at home.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual assault

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Kinuyo Tanaka, Eitarô Ozawa, Mitsuko Mito and Machiko Kyô

Credits: Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, scripted by Matsutarô Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda, based on the stories of Akinari Ueda. A Daiei Studios release on Tubi, other streamers.

Running time: 1:36

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Movie Preview: Jack Quaid feels no pain in “Novocaine”

Posted on December 12, 2024 by Roger Moore

A superhero action comedy guaranteed to make you wince. A little.

“Novocaine” opens in March, when we find out if Jack Quaid is about to become “a thing.”

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Netflixable? Keira and Ben Whishaw try to survive London’s “Wick World” of “Black Doves”

Posted on December 12, 2024 by Roger Moore

The one hard and fast rule of streaming action series these days is that they have to be page-turners. The plot has to not just lure us in, but repeatedly add wrinkles to drag the viewer into that next episode.

Cliffhangers are optional, but cast and crew have to give us the fun and the promise of more to come, many times per episode.

“Black Doves” embodies this streaming comic thriller serial model to a T.

Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw star and more or less convince us they’d be credible professional spies and assassins. Sure, one’s no more or less willowy than the other. But just go with it.

This Joe Barton creation — “Giri/Haji” and “The Lazarus Project” were his — is derivative as all get-out, with “Red Sparrow,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Americans,” “Killing Eve” and “The Night Manager” as merely its most obvious antecedents, a high stakes mystery a set in a John Wick underworld of killers, hitman “codes,” “information” thieves and moles.

Cops? They don’t figure. “Logic” is optional, as many a “decision” makes little rational sense, as our various rivals shoot up London and generate more gun murders in the days just before Christmas than all of Britain experiences in your average year.

They carry out all this mayhem without disguising their appearances or hiding their faces in the CCTV surveillance capital of Europe, galavanting about in a notably “ostentatious” ’80s vintage shark-faced BMW seven series.

The plot’s so convoluted that the anti-climactic sixth episode is mostly spent “explaining” much of what came before.

But forget all that, or try to. Because it’s fun. When Wishaw, playing semi-retired “triggerman” Sam who’s been summoned back and is confronted by next generation female triggerwomen, he shoots, respects and mocks.

“Polly Pocket” he calls Eleanor, and even mop-topped actress Gabrielle Creevy has to admit “That’s a fair cop.” The aged, chain-smoking, mob-connected “contract” go-between (Kathryn Hunter) confronts Sam/Whishaw and the viewer with the obvious when they meet.

“You’re a little skinny, aren’t you?”

Knightley’s “Black Dove” agent is in so deep she’s married to the Defense Minister (Andrew Buchan), and she’s not inclined to take comically-detailed phone threats against her and her family seriously, or pitch in on that chat among killers and spies about each’s favorite Christmas movie. “Love Actually” never comes up.

Enlisting fellow hit-women in a suicide mission just starts an argument between Sam, Eleanor and Williams (Ella Lily Hyland).

“You want a percentage chance of success? I’d put it at 20-80 against.”

“That’s not a percentage. That’s a fraction!” “It’s a ratio! And not a good one!”

Even funnier? Everybody involved gets a face full of blood splatter at one time or another, sort of a cast initiation ritual.

The story is about a killing spree that rattles geopolitics, gets a Chinese ambassador killed and his daughter kidnapped in London. Three people curiously “linked” to that are whacked the same night. One of them is Black Dove agent Helen’s (Knightley) paramour (Andrew Koji), the guy she’s been cheating with.

When she tries to find out what happened, she’s ambushed by fake-cops and rescued by her long absent mentor, the guy who trained her in the deadly arts, Sam. Both are under the ostensible supervision of control agent Reed (Sarah Lancashire of TV’s “Happy Valley”), who runs the “sale to the highest bidder” information-stealing Black Doves.

But Sam’s past includes an unfinished “job” for the contract-arranging Lenny Lines (Hunter). And with the Chinese threatening war over how their ambassador died and the cover-up that follows, Helen’s husband is in this deeper than she or even he knows.

Helen wants revenge, Reed and Lenny want “loose ends” tidied-up and a lot of British and American agencies want to prevent WWIII.

The script cooked-up by creator Barton is amusingly Byzantine and sometimes clumsily obvious. No complexity can be so complex that it can’t withstand newer complications. No apartment with a sliding glass door balcony can be entered without somebody — somebodies — thrown or diving through it and off it.

The series has flashbacks woven throughout, telling us how everybody met everybody else, including Sam’s ex-lover (Omari Douglas) and Reed’s many manipulations of meetings and relationships. As folks don’t change their hairstyles much in the UK, this can be confusing.

The absence of police in the midst of an all-out off-the-books war on the streets is most keenly felt as we see the little “training” our Black Dove and triggerman got, and see them “investigating” their way towards a resolution to the mystery that Scotland Yard would have trouble solving.

Knightley handles the fight choreography reasonably well, especially in the “cat fights” with assorted female foes. Wishaw broods and manages to give the droll put-downs a hint of his turn as James Bond’s “Q.” Lancashire oozes self-serving menace, and Hunter, Creevy, Hyland and Isabella Wei (as that kidnapped ambassador’s daughter) provide most of the laughs.

It’s juicy and puzzling and John-Wick-glib as all get out.

But entertaining? You bet. Even if that includes shouting at the screen at this eye-rolling situation, that inhuman reaction (Hitmen and hitwomen don’t mind dying, as long as it’s by “the code?”) or whatever fresh far-fetched twist Barton & Co. have cooked up.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw, Sarah Lancashire, Andrew Buchan, Ella Lily Hyland, Gabrielle Creevy, Kathryn Hunter, Omari Douglas, Isabella Wei and Tracey Ullman

Credits: Created and written by Joe Barton. A Netflix release.

Running time: Six episodes @ :55 minutes each

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Classic Film Review: Hitchcock Close-ups and Cuts at their Most “Notorious”

Posted on December 11, 2024 by Roger Moore

A purloined key, handed-off and hidden, then “returned” with dire consequences, bottles of wine whose “vintage” sticker earns a lot of attention, a party’s champagne bucket, emptying steadily and suspensefully and the look of doom in a great actress’s ready-for-my-closeup face, all are pivotal pieces of the brilliant visual puzzle of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious.”

“Psycho” may have the most notoriety in the canon of the Master of Suspense. “Vertigo” remains his flashiest film. And Hitchcock’s other frothy, fast and fun color spectacles of the 1950s — “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief” and North by Northwest” — may dominate the ranks of fan favorites among his work.

But “Notorious” is indisputably his masterpiece. It’s built on a sneering, witty and the snare-drum tight script by Oscar-winner Ben Hecht (“Scarface,” “Spellbound”) — one of the best Hitchcock ever adapted. “Notorious” stars two of the enduring legends in motion picture history, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, and earned an Oscar nomination for one of the great character actors of his era, Berman’s “Casablanca” co-star Claude Rains.

It’s a textbook on suspense — how to build it through montage, manipulating the simplest images into edge-of-your-seat excitement and fear for our badly flawed, conflicted heroine. The framing of shots, the production design, even the many obvious rear projection effects that put characters in a careening car or on a street in Rio de Janiero, are all impeccable.

The performances are subtle, the manipulative “love/hate” relationship at its heart utterly believable.

This is the movie to see if you want to find out what all the generations of fuss about Alfred Hitchock have been about. And this is the classic you come back to, again and again, when you consider the decades of failed, passable, good-to-decent and terrific thrillers that followed it.

“Notorious” is everything a romantic thriller should be.

Bergman, costumed to the nines (by Edith Head) and inutterably gorgeous in every shot, is Alicia, daughter of a German-born naturalized American freshly convicted of treason.

It’s 1946, and modern viewers can’t help but note the traitor’s rant about the “next time” he and his kind will try to overthrow America to a judge in the South District Federal courthouse in Miami. No, the judge isn’t female and wasn’t appointed by a traitor. So this time, justice is served.

The beautiful Alicia Huberman is hounded by the press afterwards. She’s an infamous party girl who sets out to drink and party this disaster right out of her life. A mysterious stranger, not a party crasher, just sits quietly and drinks her in. He’s handsome and polished enough to earn her “I LIKE you” without actually doing anything.

Although, one could suppose letting her “I’m liable to blow up the Panama Canal at any moment” wisecrack slide counts for something.

Devlin (Grant) is a rakish and sinister. And when the party’s wound down and she’s talked him into a drunken drive down Florida’s coast, the ticket and arrest she escapes gives away his game. He’s a “cop,” a Fed. And it turns out, he wants her for a “job.”

She’d infiltrate a South American cabal of unrepentent Nazis working for the notoriuous German conglomerate IG Farben. Who knows what they’re up to? It can’t be anything good.

But “patriotism” isn’t enough to turn Alicia into “a stool pigeon.”

“No thank-you. I don’t go for ‘patriotism.'”

Still, the handsome stranger would be her “handler.” OK, then. Maybe she’ll even sober up. For him.

Rains plays the mark, Alex, a rich and connected member of this industrial scale war crime cabal. He was sweet on Alicia, back when her father was free to engage in Nazi activities in an unsuspecting America. She can cozy up to him, get names and find out what these creeps are planning in post-war Brazil and the rest of the Americas.

The script sets up a great clash of wills, with Grant’s Devlin rarely letting us love and concern entering his side of the bargain. Bergman’s Alicia sees through some of his lies, and doubts his attraction.

“This is a very strange love affair.”

“Why?”

“The fact that you don’t love me...”

But once she’s in the middle of all this, with murderous scientists, businessmen and heavies all around her, she clings to Devlin like life itself, reminding him constantly of the risks she’s taking for “love.” He’s still hiding his cards.

“A man doesn’t tell a woman what to do. She tells herself.”

The genius twist to this script is the deft way Hecht — adapting a John Tainter Foote short story — folds in more than one point of view. The spy pokes around, imposes herself in conversations, listens and takes names. The handler reveals his cynicism is a “cover” when he defends her to his boss (Louis Calhern) and superiors.

And then Alex the villain, after courting and then marrying the most beautiful woman in their hemisphere, realizes he’s been rooked. We follow his machinations as he tries to extricate himself from her and the deadly jam she’s put him in.

“We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time,” is Alex’s mother’s (Leopoldine Konstantin) acidic suggestion of their way “out.”

The suspense Hitchcock mastered in his films of the ’30s becomes excruciating here as we watch the various threads unravel into a deadly finale.

A party with those mysterious vintage wines, that shrinking supply of champagne and a room full of Nazis and Nazi sympathisizers may be the climax.But nothing that follows is anti-climactic.

You listen to the bitter wit of the dialogue, savor the clockword brilliance of the plot and admire the polished perfection of “Notorious” today and it’s hard to take things like “awards season” seriously.

Sure, it was nominated for a couple of Oscars (Hecht and Rains). And sure, it came out the same year as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Yearling,” “Children of Paradise” and “Brief Encounter.”. When none of them could compete with the sentimental, war-just-ended melodrama “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which I’d say is showing its age more than any of those classics, there really is no “justice” in honoring great films.

At least Hitchcock, like Jimmy Stewart (“Wonderful Life”), Jane Wyman (“The Yearling”) and all the other also-rans won the consolation prize. Their films are the classics generations return to, and none of those works are held in higher esteem than “Notorious,” the thriller-lover’s thriller, the Bergman fan’s touchstone and the Cary Grant movie where he kept his cards closest to the chest, making this heroic villain or villainous hero the romantic matinee idol’s greatest dramatic achievement.

star

Rating: “approved,” TV-14, alcohol abuse

Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Leopoldine Konstantin, Ivan Triesault and Louis Calhern.

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Ben Hecht, based on a short story by John Tainter Foote. An RKO release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:4

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