Movie Nation

Pasquale Marrazzo’s “The Neighbor,” titled “Hotel Milano” in Italy, is a melodramatically tragic gay romance about two lovers kept apart after one is beaten into a coma by gay bashing skinheads.

The comatose Luca (Jacopo Costantini) has no idea his conservative Catholic family won’t let his “We are going to get old together, don’t forget that” partner Riki (Michele Costabile) visit and try to comfort him, because his parents are grieving, but still fully capable of blaming Riki for “luring” their son away and is thus responsible for him being in the hospital.

Luca’s sister (Luisa Vernelli) is tolerant and compassionate enough to give the frantic Riki updates, but she won’t tell him which hospital Luca’s in and “can’t” broach the subject of him visiting with her docgmatic parents.

Marrazzo’s film begins with the bullying the leads to the beating, and as Luca lies in the hospital, unresponsive with his doctor bracing everyone for “the worst” (in Italian with English subtitles), Riki’s flashbacks flesh out their romance and the ugly history he has with the gang leader who beat his lover almost to death simply for being gay.

Luca’s mother (Lucia Vasini) is unbending, disapproving to the point of being tactless when the two men have their mothers over for a meal. Riki and his clingy, weepy, substance-abusing mom (Rossanna Gay) slip out rather than deal with the attitudes of Mrs. 1955.

The flashbacks are more expositonal than emotional, and the same holds for the shifts in point of view. We see much of the story from Riki’s angle, but sister Rachelle finally getting up the nerve to ask her parents gives us their post-coma state — guilt-ridden, but still angry. We see the arrested thug visited by his own father, and simplistically note the way violence is taught, not inherited.

And we meet an uncle Riki is unusually reliant on, and get clues about a different cause-and-effect in play there.

Queer cinema has differing degrees of sophistication, depending on how far along the road to tolerance this or that film culture has been. Marrazzo’s downbeat, slow and repetitive tale — with shouting-match fireworks in addition to depicting the savage beating –feels like an American indie of the late ’80s.

The structure gives the picture a diffuse feel, as if the writer-director hopes to lay on backstory that will distract us from how short a distance this story covers and not allow the viewer to realize how thin the text is, with or without these subtexts.

The performances, verbal explosions aside, share the picture’s generally flat tone.

Neither of the movie’s two innocuous titles resonate or have any explained meaning, although we’re allowed to conjure up explanations in our heads. And whatever style points Marrazzo thought he was scoring with his “daring” finale left me cold.

Still, with gay bashing on the rise around the world, this Pride Month release seems timely, if not exactly novel in its plot, characters or unaffecting storytelling.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Michele Costabile, Jacopo Costantini, Rossana Gay, Lucia Vasini and Luisa Vernelli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pasquale Marrazzo. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:36

The most daring thing about “Missed Connections,” a chaste social media romance from the Philippines, is the conclusion it comes to.

Maybe social media isn’t the cure for dating ills and loneliness that it’s made out to be. No, it’s that’s not exactly a hot take. And this spineless, often insipid screenplay kind of walks back from that.

But considering how lifeless, charmless and predictably pointless everything that’s come before it is, that’s a straw we’ll grasp, if only for a moment.

This Around the World with Netflix rom-com is about 20somethings missing and then misconnecting via an app. They’re in their mid-20s, but the movie about their “relationship” might be deemed junior high juvenile in much of the rest of the world. Not every Filipino film has to have an edge, but come on.

Mae (Miles Ocampo) is a fresh-faced custom t-shirt maker trying to make a go of it despite being disorganized, unfocused and perhaps even a tad lazy. We meet her as she’s laying another excuse on a customer, and finally just giving up and telling him off.

Mae is self-absorbed and lonely, desperate for a boyfriend but so lost in her phone that she barely notices the cute guy (Kelvin Miranda) she brusquely treats as an employee at the supermarket. But notice him she does, and gushing and batting her eyes she basically runs through a low-comedy silent cinema repertoire of “female and thirsty” “indicators to impress him before he leaves the store.

He seems too polite to tell the annoying chatterbox with the stringy, Garfield-orange hair he’s not interested.

But she posts an inquiry about the “Mister Green” she missed paying back for the muffin he inadvertantly treated her to at the cash register on this “Missed Connections” app — a PG-rated Grindr for tracking down someone you might have “had a moment” with, but not long enough to get a name, number or actually to confirm interest.

Sure enough, there he is, a guy looking for “Grocery Girl.” It’s only when they actually meet for lunch that she realizes it wasn’t her he was looking for. That doesn’t discourage Needy Mae or warn off Too-Polite “Norman” before he finds himself coming home with her…to redesign her website and help her rethink her business.

He’s a neat freak, especially when comes to plates and eating utensils. She’s an inveterate procrastinator and slob. Is she a hoarder?

“Things hold memoires only the owner can see” (in Filipino with subtitles, or dubbed). That’s basically another warning sign Norman ignores.

One thing he’s not too polite to do is to insist on meeting the woman he was looking for in the first place, a gorgeous influencer (Chienna Filomeno) and hair salon owner — organized, ambitious and easy on the eyes.

Mae doesn’t listen to her aunt’s advice about caution, and ignores her pesky ex (JC Santos), who isn’t in her life but is so in her head that he’s always popping up to warn her, when he’s not teasing and taunting her about “He’s just going to leave you like everybody else.”

Mae becomes a stalker, and worse. Social media doesn’t just build people up. It can tear them down.

The dialogue is sickeningly cutesie, with Ocampo vamping “I’m looking for a partner, if you’re interested” lines about her business to ensure Norman can’t miss how INTERESTED she is in not being alone.

The acting is broad, the messaging is demure and conservative, about “things that we’re unable to let go of” and the “two types of women” in the world.

“There are women to be taken seriously, and women to be taken for a ride.”

Whatever cultural mores “Missed Connections” is operating under, there aren’t many parts of the world where this tepid, tame adults-flirting-like-tweens rom-com will be seen as romantic or comic.

Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Miles Ocampo, Kelvin Miranda, JC Santos, Matet de Leon and Chienna Filomeno

Credits: Directed by Jelise Chung, scripted by Jelise Chung and Gilliann Ebreo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

You take one look at these kids, and your first thought might be “Does the orphanage have anybody else we could adopt?”

They’re albino-pale, white-haired blondes with eager-to-please smiles. But golly, who wouldn’t say, “Childrens of the Damned” the moment they see them?

“Tin & Tina” is a seriously slow-footed Spanish thriller about a couple that adopts two convent-raised-kids and starts to wonder if the children’s literal take on the Bible is something they can survive, much less rationalize having under the same roof.

First-time feature writer-director Rubin Stein conjures up this middling tale of terror in the Spain of the early ’80s. The attempted coup of 1981 plays out on TV, at one point, along with cheesy kids’ shows, ’80s styled news and landmark soccer matches.

I guess he’s nostalgic? The reasons this is a period piece aren’t crystal clear, although perhaps they have something to do with Spain shedding its Catholic-endorsed fascist past at this moment.

Lola (Milena Smit) grew up a convent herself, or so husband Adolfo (Jaime Lorente) tells the barefoot Mother Superior (Teresa Rabal) when they come hoping to adopt. We’ve seen their big church wedding, and the blood-stained wedding dress that tells us Lola has lost the twins she was carrying during the ceremony.

“Are you sure about this?” doesn’t dissuade Lola, once she meets the two pre-tweens. These kids need love, and she has it to give.

But from the moment they get home to the big, remote mansion tucked into the middle of orchards, the children — both named for Saint Augustine, Tin (Carlos González Morollón) and Tina (Anastasia Russo) are just…off.

They decorate the walls with crufixes, to guard the house against “The Exterminating Angel.” They freeze-up if a meal begins without saying grace. Their conversations, plays and drawings have a Biblical literalism about them that is worrying.

But you’d think the adults would REALLY freak out by their little “Talk to God” game. It involves suffocating each other until they commune with The Almighty, beckoning them through the Pearly Gates, I guess. A great time to ask God for a favor, Tina suggests.

I mean, when they do that to a strangely unmoveable Lola, you’d think she’d get a clue, or at least start teaching right from wrong, dangerous from safe and how to separate reality from a book of mythology without pro-punishment Adolfo, an oft-absent airline pilot, telling her that’s what she needs to do.

The foreshadowing has as many red herrings as genuine threats, but the threats escalate in all the easily-anticipated ways. The family’s pet Alsatian is onto these kids by instinct, barking away at the damned.

Uh oh.

There’s something to this motivating subtext, kids who are either naive Biblical literalists or “evil…justifying their evil actions (in Spanish with subtitles, or dubbed)” with Old and New Testament punishments, “justice” and revenge.

But nobody in this movie reacts in normal, human ways to danger or threats or mortal sins.

Smit makes Lola seem medicated, depressed and broken almost from the start. She lost a leg in her miserable childhood and seems downcast and distracted, the perfect “mom” to two rambunctious and possibly evil niños. Lorente’s Adolfo isn’t much more on the ball.

The kids are cardboard caricatures of pale-faced angels/demons.

Stein takes forever to get the picture on its feet, and when it does it never manages more than a slow, hobbling gait, and yes, I know the Devil’ll get me for that analogy.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Milena Smit, Jaime Lorente, Carlos González Morollón, Anastasia Russo and Teresa Rabal

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rubin Stein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

You think you’ve got a handle on “The Golden Age of Screwball Comedy,” after finishing your survey of the films of Lubitsch and Sturges, Capra and Wilder and the occasional fun outing by Hanks, Fleming, La Cava and Cukor.

And then another one pops and damned if you don’t have to reconsider the lightly-regarded resume of MGM mainstay Jack Conway, and MGM’s place in the screwball firmament.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer was the embodiment of “The Dream Factory” — emphasis on “factory” — back then. But every now and again, something supremely silly got through “the genius of the system,” its lunacy intact. And chances are, that wiseacre William Powell was in it.

Powell, of the clipped mustache and clipped, razor-edged voice, was made for “screwball” — a fast-talker among fast-talkers, a sassy sage in a sea of wise-crackers.

“Libeled Lady” was one of Powell’s many teamings with Myrna Loy. While I like a couple of their many “Thin Man” comedies, I never quite fell in love with those movies. They’re an uneven series that seemed to fall off entirely too steeply for my taste.

And the fact that Powell and Loy play a tippling, dog-loving crime-solving married couple waters down the series’ appeal, too. The banter is the polished patter of two longtime equals, but lacks the edge of folks who don’t get along and work their way towards romance. The films aren’t “predicament” rom-coms, which offer more possibilities than the simple crime busting couple game.

But in “Libeled Lady,” they square off, Spencer Tracy and the iconic blonde Jean Harlow go toe-to-toe, Powell trades shots with Harlow and Tracy and Tracy gets into it with Loy. It’s an embarassment of bantered riches.

“Gladys, do you want me to KILL myself?”

“Did you change your INSURANCE?”

Screenwriters Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer cooked up the plot, about a newspaper that blunders into a libelous smear of socialite Connie Allenbury (Loy). Newspaperman Warren Haggerty (Tracy) abandons his latest wedding day with the long-suffering Gladys (Harlow) to try and save them.

There’s nothing for it but to track down that reporter he fired, smartassed Bill Chandler (Powell). There’s nobody like Chandler for scheming them out of a libel suit. But he’s nowhere to be found.

“Maybe that guy’s dead!”

“Yeah, it’d be just like him to die at a time like this.”

But find him they do, and Haggerty begs and bargains the high-living/free-spending Chandler back into the fold. There’s nothing for it, the shifty hack says, but for him to go to Europe, woo Miss Allenbury into a honey trap and scandalize her out of suing.

Chandler’ll need a quicky marriage before setting sail. Who’ll agree to be his wife to ensure “cheating with a married man” headlines? Only Gladys is at hand.

Haggerty begs — “Would I ask you to do this thing for me if I didn’t consider you practically my wife?

Gladys demurs — “Would you ask your wife to hook up with that ape?”

Chandler weighs in — “The ape objects.”

But they marry and he sprints off to Europe to pass himself off as a fellow swell, to pretend to be a published expert on fishing to impress Connie’s dad (Walter Connolly) and maybe sweep cynical Connie right off her feet.

“That man is a first class angler!”

“If he’s first class, I’m traveling steerage.“

The romantic complications are deliciously Byzantine, as Chandler repels/charms Connie and Gladys, almost in spite of himself. Their exchanges crackle, but on different wavelengths as Connie is plainly out of his league and Gladys isn’t as “dumb blonde” as she seems.

This escapist romp takes place on those gorgeous dream factory soundstages — save for one Sonora, California trout stream interlude that is pure slapstick and probably inspired the ’60s rom-com “Man’s Favorite Sport.”

One definition of “screwball” is “a sex comedy without the sex.” And one shared characteristic of “screwball” is how well so many of these films age. The wit, the pace, the loopy predicaments, they hold up better than many a stage comedy of that era, even when you know where all this is heading.

And what we’re “heading” to is a finale when everybody has to explain to everybody else just what the hell has been going on here, and why. As knotty as this plot has been, we know it’s not going to be easy.

“She may be his wife, but she’s engaged to me!”

Powell, Tracy and Loy would go on to legendary careers. But Jean Harlow would be dead within a year, one of the great tragedies of Hollywood’s golden age.

Silent screen veteran Jack Conway would find success with Clark Gable, Robert Taylor and MGM ensemble pictures like “Saratoga,” “Boom Town” and “Honky Tonk,” with one more Powell-Loy romp (“Love Crazy”) thrown in.

And screenwriter Maurine Watkins would write the play that the movie “Roxie Hart” and the musical and blockbuster film “Chicago” were based on.

But on the screen, you’d be hard-pressed to find more fun that any of them were associated with than this classic of the screwball school.

Rating: “approved”

Cast: William Powell, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy

Credits: Directed by Jack Conway, scripted by Maurine Dallas Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer. An MGM release on Movies!, Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, etc.

Running time: 1:37

It was raining and she was on her motorcycle. So she stopped and ducked into a Parisian boite for a drink to wait it out. “L’etoile d’Or,” it was called.

She noticed the birthday party, the candles-covered cake at the table across the way. The guy the cake was for checked her out, something else she noticed.

Beautiful young women perfected their makeup in the bathroom, their off-the-shoulders dresses drawing the eye. A couple of Chinese coeds sharing her booth took selfies.

Then — gunshots, screams, pleas, bodies and blood. “From the moment I saw people die, it’s gone,” Mia tells anyone who asks (in French, with English subtitles). The details of the trauma of that night are lost, unless others who were there can help her reconstruct them.

Alice Winocour’s “Revoir Paris” (Paris Memory) is a moving, understated journey into survivor’s guilt, a film whose characters keep their big emotions to themselves. Built on a quietly compelling performance by Virginie Efira (“Benedetta,” “Elle”), it may be the best depiction of how trauma changes your psyche and your life since the Peter Weir Jeff Bridges/Rosie Perez drama “Fearless.”

Months after the mass shooting, Mia is recovering from her physical wound and even asking about plastic surgery on her abdominal scar “to make it go away.” It’s not just the scar she’s talking about.

A Russian translator for French radio, she’s been unable to go back to work. A siren, candles, off-the-shoulder dresses, all sorts of things trigger her.

Her longtime love Vincent (Grégoire Colin), an always-on-call doctor, is no comfort. When we learn she moved out of their flat for months after the assault, we’re not surprised. They were having dinner earlier and he dashed out for yet another “emergency.” He wasn’t there.

Vincent doesn’t know what to say. Friends and family treat her guardedly, “like I’m some kind of ‘attraction.'” Mia is adrift, lost.

But when something draws her back to the re-opened L’etoile d’Or (The Gold Star), she finds some sense of direction. The manager doesn’t recognize her, just the haunted look in her eyes. There’s a support group “for people like you.” It meets there. The restaurant closes for them when they do.

Mia will meet Sara (Maya Sansa), the fellow survivor who organized the group. She will learn about online message boards and group chats for people trying to reconstruct that night in their minds, or to learn about how loved ones spent their last hour.

Teenaged Felicia (Nastya Golubeva Carax), who lost her parents that night, will reach out. So will the now-badly-injured Thomas (Benoît Magimel), the birthday boy who checked Mia out for blowing out his candles.

Not everyone will be glad to see her. But at least, with their help, she’ll start to figure out what happened and how she responded to a mass shooting and siege that forever changed her life and the lives of all who survived, and the survivors of those who didn’t.

Wincour — “Proxima” and “Augustine” were hers — gently leads us on a sometimes predictable journey into the after-effects of trauma and the “purpose” that turns into a near obsession for Mia.

It’s a film without extremes of emotion, a sanguine story told with a French reserve that Hollywood would have to adorn with more flash. It’s a mystery. She’s tracking down people she remembers from that night and hunches she had going into it.

But there are no explosive moments, just tenderly moving ones — a child in the Orangerie, the last museum her parents visited to see Monet’s water lilies, a wife’s recognition that something awful that she did not experience with her husband will end her marriage, guilt growing or receding, depending on what one finds out about others and oneself and how each responded to this crisis.

Winocour doesn’t waste screen time on the machine-gunning murderer, his motives, the media coverage or therapy sessions that some must have subjected themselves to.

We hear and see testimonials from people Mia meets, and those she never meets, about what they remember about what they did and how they’ve responded to that nightmare.

And it’s all handled with care and great craftsmanship by Winocour and her team — never a slack moment, never feeling rushed, either.

Big scenes are typically what burn themselves into our memories of movies. I remember Jeff Bridges grabbing a tool box, slapping it into Rosie Perez’s seatbelted-lap, and driving them into a wall to convince her that no, she couldn’t have saved her baby in that airplane crash in 1993’s “Fearless.”

What I think I’ll remember from “Revoir Paris” is the empty feeling that only “knowing” what your memory has lost can fill, and how well-acted and sensitively directed this immersion in coming out of the other side of grief can be.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Virginie Efira, Benoît Magimel, Grégoire Colin, Maya Sansa and Nastya Golubeva Carax

Credits: Directed by Alice Winocour, scripted by Alice Winocour, Marcia Romano and Jean-Stéphane Bron. A Music Box release.

Running time: 1:45

Well, perhaps the production team behind Brazil’s Around the World with Netflix offering “Rich in Love” took criticism of their “series of limp mistaken identity mixups” rom-com to heart.

They got to make a sequel with the same beautiful, rich-but-earnestly-trying-to-contribute characters and tried to put them in a story with some cultural relevence and headline news import.

“Rich in Love 2” isn’t just about the further up-and-down romantic adventures of rich tomato empire heir Teto (Danilo Mesquita) and med-student-of-substance, now Dr. Paula (Giovanna Lancellotti).

A quartet of screenwriters, including director Bruno Garotti, take our “farmers tomato coop” organizers into Amazonia, where they meet and learn from the indigenous peoples, folks who know where the first tomato came from (Not “Italy,” kids.), see their struggles and get mixed-up in the illegal mining that threatens the rainforest, the river and everyone who eats fish that come from the Mighty Amazon.

There’s a pregnancy, a secret family legacy and a budding gay romance, too. And they pack all this onto a 90 minute movie. No, it doesn’t necessarily fit together and the serious subjects are paid lip service and little else. But there are worse subtexts to slap onto a Hallmark quality romance set in exotic Amazonia.

Tomato heir Teto is still impulsive, still casually rich and still self-absorbed, even when it comes to his doctor girlfriend. But Paula’s going on an extended medical mission deep into the Amazon, bringing health care to the remote tribes with the earnest and righteous Dr. Tawan (Adanilo Reis).

Teto is jealous. Teto is stricken. Teto has taken his eye off the ball with regards to the coop he developed with pal Monique (Lellê) and the farm employee son he grew up with and calls his “brother,” Igor (Jaffar Bambirra). His tomato barron father’s about to stop buying their produce, which will put Teto Fresca out of business.

Well, Paula’s off to the interior. Why not…move our operation there, to Porto Romansa, line up farmers and buyers, maybe Dad’s old pal/rival (Roney Villela)? It turns out, Everaldo has an interest in Teto Fresca — as a company for his daughter (Aline Dias) to run.

With their coop about to go bust, Igor and biz-partner wife Alana (Fernanda Paes Leme) expecting a baby and Monique fretting about wasting years on a project and having nothing to show for it, the incentive to sell is there. Just not for Teto.

The rich boy, fond of big, tin-eared gestures for his beloved Paula, needs to Jetski after her as she and her colleague boat off on rounds. Teto must run out of gas, get lost and get hurt so that the Hipanaa people and no-nonsense Wunin (Kay Sara) can heal him and, help him “connect with the forest,” with his non-rich fellow Brazilians and “understand yourself better (in Portugeuse, subtitled, or dubbed).”

Paula, in turn, will learn about Native cures and medicines as she and Dr. Tawan try and find out what’s making people sick. Could it be something getting in the water from the illegal mining going on right under their noses?

Somebody’s going to have to dress up as a macaw costumed folk dancer to get into a gala in Manaus. Somebody’s going to overhear dirty deals in the making. Somebody will need to pretend to be Teto and Paula to convince Everaldo to buy them out.

Honestly, hat’s off for these filmmakers trying to make all the “issue” points, show us this world and make a case for its jeopardy in a fluffy, wish-fulfillment romance.

It doesn’t really work. The happy couple becomes unhappy in exactly the way of 1786 romances that came before “Rich in Love.” Teto’s “transformation” is ordained by the script, not organic to the story. The villains are so obvious they might as well black hats.

“Rich in Love” wasn’t very good. “Rich in Love 2” isn’t either. But at least this time they set out to try and show and say something of import, which makes a decent consolation prize for a movie that will draw viewers based on the pretty people/dull story of the first film.

Rating: TV-MA, threats of violence, sex

Cast: Danilo Mesquita, Giovanna Lancellotti, Lellê, Jaffar Bambirra, Aline Dias, Fernanda Paes Leme, Adanilo Reis, Kay Sara and Roney Villela.

Credits: Directed by Bruno Garotti, scripted by Bruno Garotti, Sylvio Gonçalves, Maíra Oliveira and Jama Wapichana. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

A seasoned cast — with a couple of horror fan faves in its ranks — and a few of cool supernatural effects decorate “Brooklyn 45,” a stodgy, stagey horror tale from the director of “We Are Still Here” and “Mohawk.”

Ted Geoghegan parks five and then six players in a house for this dry drawing room thriller that touches on “the war” and what those there did in the just-ended conflict, war crimes included.

The cast is a bit long in the tooth — most of them are 60 or so — to be cast as mid-level officers, “an interrogator” and a “trigger-man” from the just-ended conflict. The parlor they gather in is too well-lit to ever take on the cachet of “spooky,” and the script — while it has some pithy dialogue — leans on long monologues, reminiscences and judgements, which don’t really deliver suspense or thrills, remorse or pathos.

But again, the few effects are clever enough.

Marla (Anne Ramsay of TV’s “Mad About You”), “the interrogator,” walks with a cane, her reminder of the German bombing that killed many on a base she was stationed at in Europe during the war. She’s escorted in by her mousie Pentagon clerk husband (Ron E. Rains).

They’re joining old friends — HER old friends — all of whom served in the conflict which ended mere months before. It’s just after Christmas, and Lt. Col. Clive Hockstetter, “Hock” (horror darling Larry Fessenden) has called in the couple, and old comrades Major Paul DiFranco (Ezra Buzzington) and Major Archie Stanton (Jeremy Holm) for a between-the-holidays reunion.

Hock’s wife died over Thanksgiving, and they’re there for support. But Hock’s mourning, the manner of his wife’s death and insensitive treatment by a priest has awakened his curiosity about what might lie “beyond.”

He needs them there to have a seance, to see if he can contact the late Susan.

“All you need is a mirror, and a couple of friends who aren’t afraid to hold hands.”

They’re all reluctant, but he’s hurting. And there’s a hint of “pulling rank” to his begging.

But when they do “reach out” and make contact, more questions come up that beg for answers, more complications, more tragedy, all of which must be resolved as they are trapped in that over-memento’d parlor by supernatural forces they can’t overcome.

The group dynamics are interesting, in a dated archetypes bickering over dated grudges way. “Marla the Merciless” interrogator is respected, her “pencil pusher” spouse is not. This one’s facing war crimes charges and that one’s still “following orders.”

And then there’s the German woman (Kristina Klebe) they discover, locked in a cabinet.

Geoghegan may have attracted some decent players and limited the scale and ambition of this piece to something manageably compact. But he doesn’t generate frights or suspense, which are Job One and Job Two in a horror thriller.

The cast does what it can with the material, but their big speeches rarely add up to a “big moment.”

And the debates/discussions here about what soldiers do in war, how soon they can let that war go, attitudes about Germans and homosexuality and those who didn’t take part in combat aren’t exactly novel or deep. Geoghegan didn’t suddenly transform into a deep thinker, an artful screenwriter or a filmmaker to watch.

Perhaps there’s more life to “Brooklyn 45” in a more natural setting for something this stagey — the stage. No stage director I know would light something supposedly spooky with foreboding like a local TV news set.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Anne Ramsay, Larry Fessenden, Ezra Buzzington, Jeremy Holm, Ron E. Rains and Kristina Klebe

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ted Geoghegan. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:33

In his most manic comedies, the great “reactor,” the unflappable Alan Arkin, looks like he’s on the verge of cracking up and blowing the take — scene after scene. He can’t wholly hide how tickled he is at what’s going on around him. It’s in his eyes, the barely-controlled grin that’s trying to bust out on his face.

You see it, here and there, in “The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.” And there’s a moment in “The In-Laws” in which he glances towards the camera in his harrowing ride, clinging to the roof of a taxi he’s just clambered aboard, as if the actor playing the part sees the cameraman laughing at how this looks and wishes he could join him.

Legend has it that Arkin was so broken up by the great character player James Hong‘s improvised chattering Mandarin monologue, adding a magazine to his improv, that he’d run Hong off the set for his close-ups, lest the man break him up even when the camera isn’t on him.

I guess that’s why Arkin never hosted “Saturday Night Live.” They’ve had enough problems with “breaking” in the middle of funny bits over the decades.

Arkin’s “In-Laws” co-star Peter Falk, on the other hand, is Chris Freaking Walken in this movie — a cold-blooded comic assassin surrounded by mortals unable to keep a straight face as he demands “More COWbell.”

Their unlikely pairing paid dividends in this beloved farce from the late ’70s, a movie built on the wit of former Mel Brooks collaborator and future “Fletch,” “Soapdish” and “The Freshman” writer Andrew Bergman, director Arthur Hiller’s eye for a great sight gag and editing for antic energy, and stars and co-stars who knew where the laughs were and delivered them.

Check any list of the “Funniest Films Ever” and “The In-Laws” is on there. If anything, it’s grown in stature over the decades, a legend that was always funnier than “Some Like It Hot,” although perhaps a little shy of the mania of Billy Wilder’s funniest film, “One, Two, Three,” as hilarious as the Best of Peter Sellers or Mel Brooks or “early” Woody Allen.

Arkin plays a New York dentist named Sheldon Kornpett whose daughter (Penny Peyser) wants to marry this nice boy, Tommy Riccardo (Michael Lembeck). Yeah, even the surnames are amusing.

But on meeting the father of the groom, Vince Riccardo (Falk), Sheldon finds himself ensnared in an ever-enlarging fiasco involving stolen printing plates for a high-dollar denomination bill, a Latin American plot to print these and wreck the American economy and the machinations of the CIA, which Vince insists is his employer.

Sheldon is implicated, lured out of his dental practice mid-patient, chased, shot at, taken hostage and taken for a ride by Vince, who seems crazy, inept and yet insanely confident that “It’ll all work out” and that they’ll somehow survive, succeed and make their kids’ deadline-approaching nuptials.

“You were involved in the Bay of Pigs?”

“Involved? That was my idea!”

Their children and wives (Nancy Dussault and Arlene Golonka) are in the dark. The CIA (Ed Begley Jr.) feigns ignorance. The heavies chasing them — thugs, thieves, US Treasury agents, maybe even the CIA — include the most menacing Paul Smith, destined to play Bluto to Robin Williams’ “Popeye” the Sailor.

The New York shenanigans get loud and out of hand as Sheldon melts down, calms down and melts down again as every time he think he’s out, some fresh horror reminds him he’s not.

“Please, God, don’t let me die on West 31st Street!”

Hint — he doesn’t. I mean, they’ve got a date with a Central American firing squad in the third act, after all.

The mayhem begins at a jog, bursts into a sprint and tumbles, head-over-heels into hilarious scene after hilarious scene, with dopey lines fans can quote from memory.

The gunplay is all fun and games until they find themselves delivering the plates to General Garcia (Richard Libertini), dictator of tiny Tijuara, down Central America way. Avoiding assasins will require running “Serpentine, Shelly! Serpentine!” Because Garcia’s killers are not to be discounted.

“These are the best security men in the world. The used to work for J.C. Penney in Detroit.“

But the General, a goofy madman overly fond of his Señor Wences hand-puppet routine, runs a cut-rate firing squad. A last cigarette, but no lighter? No BLINDfolds?

“We have no blindfolds, señor. We are a poor country!”

The picture started life as a sequel to Hiller’s “Freebie and the Bean,” the first comedy to prove James Caan could be funny. But you can’t top the chemistry of Arkin and Falk, a polished double-act with Arkin amping up his reactor shtick an octave or two, and Falk worrying his Columbo-as-“The Cheap Detective” routine right into our funnybones.

It’s a movie that looks like every shootout and big action beat was filmed at 8 a.m., whose plot seems so shambolic it feels invented, on the fly, on set. The cultural references are as dated as the film stock. Just how fine a line this farce walked became obvious when Hollywood tried to remake it. No Falk. No Arkin. No dice.

Every scene sets up the next, every escalation works and every supporting player adds to the madcap complexity and comic inevitability of it all.

Every time you rewatch it, what you’ve forgotten tickles you again, what you’ve missed gives you a new grin.

Is that character-actor-in-the-making David Paymer as a New York cabbie Vince enlists in their crusade? It was the “Get Shorty” punchline’s first film role.

With the passing of time, the richness of the laughs — simple or exaggerated gestures, rising voices, underreactions and over-reactions — becomes the ultimate compliment for a classic.

It’s hilarious movie comfort food, worth watching again and again.

Some years back, I was grabbing a coffee with my then-brother-in-law at a Brooklyn cafe, when Luis leaned across the table and whispered “The In-Laws,” darting his eyes across the dining room at the one, the only, Richard Libertini.

It took me a minute to remember his name, but indeed, there he was — General Garcia in the flesh. We both glanced back to re-confirm, he caught our eyes and twinkled. We smiled and nodded, as New Yorkers or those impersonating them do. Anything more demonstrative would be uncool.

Luis and I swapped lines from the movie, quietly, giggling just as quietly.

But as he passed our table on leaving, I asked the Great Libertini, “Still no blindfolds?” He looks at Luis, whom he knew had “made” him first, leaned down conspiratorily and hissed “SERPENTINE!”

For actors, classic is any movie you’d love to be remembered for.

Rating: PG

Cast: Peter Falk, Alan Arkin, Nancy Dussault, Penny Peyser, Arlene Golonka, Michael Lembeck, Paul Smith, Ed Begley Jr., Richard Libertini and James Hong

Credits: Directed by Arthur Hiller, scripted by Andrew Bergman. A Warner Brothers release on Amazon, Movies!, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:43

When you watch “Mixed by Erry” — it’s adorable, so you should — don’t opt for the English dubbed option on Netflix. Take it in via its native tongue — Neopolitan Italian.

Few movies make it clearer that Italian is the language — hand gestures included — of negotiation, bargaining, hustling, of irritation, panic and pathos. You’re cheating yourself of some of the fun by dodging the subtitles that come with this most musical of the Romance languages.

“Mixed” is the story of three young brothers from Naples who built the second largest record distributor in Italy during the ’80s, surfing the musical curve between New Wave and the New Romantics. And we’re halfway through the story of their unlikely rise to fame and riches before someone uses the word we now know is shorthand for the theft of intellectual property like books, movies, programs and music — “Pirati!”

That’s right, the Frattasio Brothers, the pride of rough and tumble Forcello, the “fell off a truck” district of Naples, were the kings of music piracy during the Golden Age of the Cassette.

Hey, one guy’s “mixtape” is another guy’s under-the-table bargain. “Dimenticallo,” as they say in old Italy. “Fuggedaboutit.”

Sydney Sibilia, who made the equally charming and roguish “Rose Island” a few years back, tells another “true story” of Italian rascals, kids raised by their pops (Adriano Pantaleo) to make a dishonest lira.

Peppe, Angelo and Enrico, aka “Erry,” knew playing with their friends had to end when Mama (Cristiana Dell’Anna) called out, “Time to make the tea.”

Papa was bringing home empty Jack Daniels bottles to refill, and you had to brew the tea just right to match the patina of fine Tennessee whisky in the bottles, which their father would hustle in the open air market next to the train station.

But Enrico dreams bigger than that. He’s obsessed with music, and parlays that into a job at the local record shop. Years later, in 1985, Erry (Luigi D’Oriano) wants to use that encyclopedic knowledge to become a club DJ. All he lacks are the looks, swagger and charisma to pull that off.

It’s his memory for tunes, ear for the Next Big Thing and ability to gauge someone’s tastes by what they’re listening to now that will change their lives. Nobody is better at whipping up romantic, dance, etc. mixtapes than Erry. When the record store closes, he wonders if he can make a living selling those hand-labeled, curated “hits” packages to customers looking for cheap tunes. .

Hustler Peppe (Guiseppe Arena) crunches the numbers and doesn’t see that as a shady business model that works. But his new bride (Chiara Celotto), won over by the mixtape Erry made for Peppe, has heard of this fast-duplicator machine that’s revolutionized the tape business in that pre-digital age.

A visit to their local loan shark, and they’re up and running. When Peppe recruits his fellow cigarette smugglers to “change with the times” and hustle their wares, they have “distribution.”

And when older brother Angelo (Emanuele Palumbo) gets out of prison after hospitalizing a bully beating up Erry, they have their prison-polished “muscle.” The Frattasio Brothers are ready to conquer Naples, Italy and the world, a million “mixtape” cassettes at a time.

Francesco Di Leva plays the obsesssed financial crimes cop who can’t get any Naples prosecutor interested in cracking down on this crime. Until, that is, the brothers start releasing tapes of performances of the big Sanremo Song festival before it’s aired on TV.

“Pirati!” they yell.

The soundtrack — mixed, apparently, by the real life “Erry” — is peppered with the Euro-pop of the era — Kim Wilde to Eurythmics to early hip hop and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The leads are lightly amusing, with young D’Oriano giving off strong Jay Baruchel energy.

“Mixed by Erry” isn’t an awards contender, just a fun bit of history engagingly related. It’s the situations and the story — told at a bouncing, reasonably brisk pace with just enough voice-over narration to let us keep up — that make this movie.

Scared to death meeting the loan shark, overwhelmed when the big cassette manufacturer wines and dines them, buying a Lambourghini with their illicit cash, Erry wooing the music-loving customer Teresa (Greta Esposito) with his “I know what you’d like” (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed) superpower, reveling at their peak but seeing the writing on the wall even then — it all plays.

And as anybody who ever made a mixtape knows, it’s not just the perfect songs that make it, it’s the order they’re played in. Sibilia, framing the story as a flashback from prison, gets that and once again delivers.

Ben fatto, signore. Ben fatto.

Rating: TV-MA, some violence, profanity

Cast: Luigi D’Oriano, Giuseppe Arena, Emanuele Palumbo, Chiara Celotto, Greta Esposito, Adriano Pantaleo and Francesco Di Leva

Credits: Directed by Sydney Sibilia, scripted by Armando Festa and Sydney Sibilia. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

There’s a moody, intimate and festival-darling short film tucked into the 105 minutes of “Esme, My Love.” But as a feature, this mild-mannered but atmospheric tale of slow-slower-slowest “rising” terror just doesn’t have enough going on to rope the viewer in.

A mother (Stacey Weckstein) drives her supposedly sickly daughter Esme (Audrey Grace Marshall) into the forest “for some fresh air.”

The child is confused and protesting this visit to the place “where we’re from,” mother Hannah’s childhood home out in the country. Mom seems troubled, distracted, with images flashing of a car accident or some other tragedy.

Is this “what happened,” or what might have happened or what might possibly happen? Hard to say.

Because director and co-writer Cory Choy has made his feature debut a film concerned with the mother-daughter dynamic, cryptic clues and a possibly idyllic/possibly-traumatic past, but not with answering questions.

Mom keeps talking about her sister, Emily. Emse looks just like her, but is annoyed with Mom’s “clingy” thing and can only be distracted by backpacking into the woods, nature, the tumbledown house they rummage through and the catamaran Mom won’t launch into the lake with her.

“You won’t be my little girl forever,” Mom tells her. True enough,” Hannah,” how Esme addresses her mother when she’s trying to get her attention. But what’s your point?

Hannah has reveries and nightmares, angelic visions and horrific forebodings.

“My past is connecting with us,” she insists. “The answers, they’re out there!”

“We have to DIG,” she also insists. So they do — in the house, around it, holes in the forest.

One can get a pretty good idea of what’s going on and what Choy and co-writer Laura Allen were going for. And the players can do their utmost to maintain the mystery while slowly ramping up the fear or sense of alarm the viewer is supposed to feel, and this still never amounts to more than a chilly shrug.

The tone is dark, the “jolts” mild and the resolution opaque, not clear enough to justify the 100 minutes that preceded it.

Rating: unrated, disturbing images

Cast: Audrey Grace Marshall, Stacey Weckstein.

Credits: Directed by Cory Choy, scripted by Laura Allen and Cory Choy. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:45