Movie Nation

“Adagio” is a classic 100 minute thriller in a 126 minute package.

Director and co-writer Stefano Sollima takes his sweet time setting the scene — which he never identifies as greater Rome, Lazio — and takes even longer letting us know what we’re diving into, a tale of blackmail involving mobsters, dirty cops and a young pawn trapped in two worlds.

Sollima takes a longer while introducing the disparate characters, and longer still to identify them by name and association. This slow, “make the audience come to you” mystery becomes seriously tedious, after a while.

Although there are grace notes and riveting touches in the later acts, the finale proves to be an anti-climax as Sollima draws things out some more. He doesn’t even know when to drop the mike.

But it’s all there in the not-exactly-ironic title. As any classical music fan can tell you, “Adagio” means “slowly” in Italian.

We follow the young, headphone-wearing music fan (Gianmarco Francini) into one of those lurid, over-the-top, over-designed movie versions of a disco, where the team of cops tracking “the puppy” have their orders, which they’ve passed on to him. Get something that incriminates someone on one of the many surveillance cameras they’ve planted there.

The kid is in over his depth, surrounded by drag queens and drugs, which he is more than happy to sample. Realizing he’s incriminating himself, he bolts.

That draws out single-father-of-two detective Vasco (Adriano Giannini), in a fury and using his team’s tech expert and “cleaner” (Lorenzo Adorni) and muscle (Francsco Di Leva) as he hunts their “puppy” down.

Whatever their credentials, tech and surveillance expertise, these cops are up to no murderous good.

The kid, Manuel, lives with his aged, addled father (Toni Servillo) whose gangland name — “Daytona” — he drops as he scampers about, trying to find “help” to save his skin and get him out of this jam. He turns to the blind mobster (Valerio Mastandrea) nickamed Polniuman. And Polniuman (say it aloud) sends Manuel to bald, scowling “I can’t help you” badman “Romeo,” played with a largely internalized menace by Pierfrancesco Favino.

“You know a lot of things you shouldn’t know,” “the puppy” is told (in Italian with English subtitles). The viewer? We know little, but we start to find things out, bit by bit as this Byzantine scheme unfolds.

There are old grudges and ancient alliances in play here, old mobster codes and big money and Italian politics being manipulated by dirty cops out for a payday.

A couple of twists remind us of true pieces of American gangland lore — the pose mob boss Vincent Gigante affected for his own safety, etc. And the film’s climax has a brute elegance that makes us long for the more streamlined story that should have led to it.

The Rome depicted here is threatened by wildfires which lead to constant power outages, often at dramatically opportune moments. Sollima (“Gomorrah,” “Sicario 2”) likes telling tales with sweep and allegorical darkness. But even taking that into account, this picture is slow right to the edge of dullness.

Nepo baby Giannini — son of Giancarlo — has the film’s showiest role, a cop who has lost the plot and crosses from “Get that money” to “Clean this up” to “Kill that kid, no matter what.”

But it is the old men and their old ways that carry this slow-footed thriller, with Favino (“Angels & Demons,” “World War Z”) and Servillo (“Il Divo”) lending their “old men still capable of violence” gravitas to a story that would have been better served by quicker pacing.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, drugs, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, Gianmarco Francini, Adriano Giannini, Valerio Mastandrea, Lorenzo Adorni, Francesco Di Leva and Silvia Salvatori.

Credits: Directed by Stefano Sollima, scripted by Stefano Bises and Stefano Sollima. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

You can’t say the dark Spanish comedy “The Coffee Table” isn’t dark enough. It involves the tragic, accidental and bloody death of an infant. But considering the subject matter, maybe the “comedy” could have gone a little further.

Director and co-writer Caye Casas presents us with a “couple in trouble,” a hideous piece of furniture, the pathological liar selling it to them and a wife and new mother so hateful, right down to the 17,000 cigarettes Spanish timbre of her voice, that finding someone or some outcome to root for here is a chore.

There are deadpan laughs in this “How will I ever tell her about the accident?” comedy, but they are few and far between, and strained.

Maria (Estefanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja) are a long-married 40ish couple who just had a baby. When you see and hear their interactions in the furniture store, you pick up pretty quick on why it took so long for them — or him, at least — to take that step.

Maria is a bit argumentative. Short-tempered. And she calls the salesman (Eduardo Antuña) out on every lie he attaches to this two “fake” gold nude nymphs balancing a glass top table her husband is determined to buy.

Whatever decisions they’ve made as a couple, this one she’s left to him. And she sure as hell isn’t interested in letting him make it. Judging from the item in question, we see her point.

“I don’t want this table in our home,” she growls, in Spanish with English subtitles. But Jesús is still listening to the “Swedish design” and “Chinese” price and “bulletproof glass” claims by the BS artist salesman who hears a lot more about their marriage than would seem necessary as they bicker in the store.

She decided it was now or never on having a child. She dubbed the baby Cayetano, naming him for someone her husband bristles is “a fascist bullfighter.” But at least he gets to pick the table, right?

Imagine his horror when, after assembling the glasstop, noting a “missing screw” and being left alone with the baby for the first time, he trips and the baby bullfighter is killed. Blood everywhere.

Any man who has ever been married will pick up what might be the worst consequence of this. Maria’s justifiable flip-out over this is sure to include the ultimate “I TOLD you so!”

He tries to clean up the blood — he’s injured, too. He tries to secure cleaning products from the neighbor’s 13 year-old monster teen, Ruth (Gala Flores), who INSISTS that he “tell your wife about us.” The little psycho has apparently invented an attraction and “relationship” in her mind, which Jesús cannot talk her out of.

As our incompetent table-shopper struggles with his first babysitting nightmare, he re-encounters the salesman, fends off his younger brother (Josep Maria Riera) and the brother’s pregnant and much younger girlfiend (Claudia Riera) and tries to figure out how to tell his ill-tempered wife this terrible news.

The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff. The biting banter in the opening scene is almost funny, in a cringey way. The building suspense is more pained than amusing, but as such it gives the picture a pathos that the script sets out to upend.

And the horror of what has happened, described in gory detail late in the third act, never quite plays as “We know we shouldn’t laugh, but we must.” Because we — or at least I — didn’t.

Rating: unrated, profanity, dead baby subject matter

Cast: David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos, Josep Maria Riera, Gala Flores, Claudia Riera and Eduardo Antuña

Credits: Directed by Caye Casas, scripted by Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas. A Cinephobia release.

Running time: 1:31

One long ago gave up any hope that Hollywood would give up any “hit” intellectual property without wringing the last drops of value out of it. But the news that there will be a third “Downton Abbey” movie, with Paul Giamatti reprising a character from the series and that Joely Richardson and Alessandro Nivola will join the cast for it, gives me an excuse to renew my plea that this worldwide phenomenon, running on setnimental fumes for its most recent big screen treatment, be given a graceful, apt and historically-defensible send-off.

“Gosford Park” screenwriter and series creator Julian Fellowes has been reluctant to take the Great House and its era towards a natural coda, which might be the lone gripe I have with this popular, populous and period-perfect highbrow soap opera.

It was never going to be “Brideshead Revisited,” because Fellowes, a terrific screenwriter, is no Evelyn Waugh. But “Brideshead” points the way for how to wrap this saga up with a fond farewell to the age of legions of lower-class Britons employed “in service” in a vast, unmanageable mansion whose inheritance, National Trust listing and tax breaks still would rarely be enough to keep it practically liveable.

“Brideshead Revisited,” based on the 1945 Waugh novel, has been filmed a few times, most famously as a 1981 TV series that became the “Downton” of its day. That story, told in flashback, used the World War II service that great house — Brideshead — as a training grounds/billeting for the British military as its framing device.

One could see the house as it once was and what it would become, nothing any one family facing progressive taxation could afford and keep up in the manner of such manors of the past, a mansion symbolic of Britain’s class-divided past and somewhat more equitable future.

Something like that was the subtext of the early run of the “Downton Abbey” TV series — World War I intruding on the stately pile and its generations of inhabitants, a property saved by the heir’s timely marriage to American money now full of people “doing our bit” for the Empire and the war effort.

World War II, its grim tests and a culture bracing for “the change” that would sweep over the British aristocracy and their estates in post-war Britain would be a great way to wrap this story up, giving the locale and its inhabitants purpose and the viewer a bit of “We’ll meet again” and “Keep Calm and Carry On” nostalgia.

Literally anything else — another story set in the ’30s, immune to the worldwide depression outside their grounds — would just be more of the same, cinematic running-in-place. And I would hope Fellowes wouldn’t want that, no matter how much Focus Features might.

Writer-director Sarah T. Schwab’s “A Stage of Twilight” is a somber melodrama about a couple facing an end-of-life decision with despair and as much grace as either can manage, under the circumstances.

It makes a fine showcase for its venerated, venerable leads — Karen Allen and William Sadler. But the plot only escapes from the tropes of this downbeat genre by shoehorning in tropes of another as we meet a young neighbor struggling to decide his own future while coping with family responsibilities and a romantic entanglement.

Schwab never overcomes the grim seriousness implicit in the subject matter, never allows a lighter moment and never quite brings us to tears, despite Allen’s best efforts.

Allen plays Cora, a small town librarian in rural New England (New Milford, Connecticut was the filming location), a woman whom we learn aspired to more than this in the opening scene, re-shelving books.

One was a novel Cora wrote years before, and she smiles when she notes that people have been checking it out and reading it.

Husband Barry (Sadler) shows up to surprise her with an anniversary dinner. Her laments of how “old and frumpy” she looks prompt a smirk and a twinkle. But his wasting cough tells us this won’t just be about love and devotion. He quickly learns his prognosis has changed. He has three months to live.

Barry runs through a range of reactions, “toe-tagging the pipes” of their aged farmhouse so that a future plumber will be able to make speedy repairs, buying a truckload of firewood. Barry’s got in mind to take care of Cora after he’s gone. But he decides “I don’t want your last memory of me to be of some old, sick man.” He’s got a plan for that, too.

As we pick up hints of their long-ago courtship and Cora’s distress at their differing approaches to this inevitable fate, their young neighbor Jimmy (Marlon Xavier) is starting to wonder if life on dad’s dairy farm is all there is. An ag-and-tech college might be in Jimmy’s future, if his stubborn father (Alfredo Narcisco) is willing to listen to reason and his smart kid’s ideas for improving their operation.

Jimmy’s local ties include the girlfriend (Emily Kratter) who has their entire future mapped out for them. Cora, perhaps wondering about her own path not taken, passes on suggestions that remind us of what fonts of helpful information librarians often are, even if one’s high school guidance counselor is no help.

The limited scope of the drama lapses into melodrama as Barry states his dogged intentions for “the end” and Jimmy visits college and promptly finds himself a potential girlfriend with wider horizons — not much wider, as every young woman he meets seems to appreciate his prospects for inheriting a big dairy farm.

The players are fine, but the mopey pace and somewhat generic “twists” to the plot make “A Stage of Twilight” — whose title promises a literariness the script never lives up to — something of a well-intentioned slog.

Rating: unrated, sex, fisticuffs

Cast: Karen Allen, William Sadler, Marlon Xavier, Emily Kratter, Alexander Flores and Alfredo Narcisco.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah T. Schwab. A Cardinal Flix release on Amazon

Running time: 1:47

Vikander plays the last and perhaps toughest of the Six Wives of Henry XIII, Kateryn (Catherine) Parr, the one who tempted fate and stood up to the murderous monarch and lived to tell the tale.

This summer release is from the director of “Invisible Life” and “Mariner of the Mountains.”

Brian Van Holt also stars in this serial killer thriller. The serial killer might be a “cop?”

“The Bone Collector,” they call the man they’re hunting.

Gibson plays an FBI Agent/profiler, Curtis Jackson a police chief. This Lionsgate release drops July 5.

Theater actor Keith Kupferer and daughter Katherine Mallen Kupferer star in this dramedy about how it takes to create a problem child, and how acting can connect even people who have trouble remembering their lines to their feelings.

June 14, this IFC festival darling comes to theaters.

Maverick movie maker, indie icon, “Pope of Pop Cinema,” sponsor of the careers of the great and near great, Roger Corman made a singular mark on the movies over a career that spanned half a century.

Directors Demme and Coppola and Ron Howard  and others got their start making movies the Corman way — fast and fun and furious and cheap. Actors such as Jack Nicholson got their foot in the filmmaking door on Corman sets.

Just last week I reviewed “Machine Gun Kelly,” a breakthrough film for the director, producer and impresario, and for actor Charles Bronson. It crackles with energy and plays as if it was shot in ten days. Which it was.

That’s the best way to remember him today, watching one of his gangster movies, his monster pics, his beloved Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

Got to Tubi or YouTube or Amazon and watch one. They’re all over the free streamers.

He led a life and had a career worth celebrating, and that’s a way to celebrate it.

Long before its gambling revival and later slow return to decay, long before Louis Malle’s 1980 drama “Atlantic City,” the historic but forlorn resort city had been emblematic of American ennui, a place of elegaic, baroque nostalgia and decline.

The boardwalk beachside town, immortalized on the board game “Monopoly,” is a most evocative setting for director Bob Rafelson’s “The King of Marvin Gardens,” another of his classic collaborations (“Five Easy Pieces,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice”) with his muse, Jack Nicholson.

It’s an essay in excess, depression and delusions, capturing an America that had turned the corner on Vietnam as it braced for the Watergate scandal to come. Downbeat, droll and thought-provoking, it lets Nicholson play the quiet, brooding and long-suffering intellectual younger brother to a mercurial hustler sibling, Jason (Bruce Dern).

Many of this classic film’s pleasures derive from this mismatch, Nicholson maintaining his “Five Easy Pieces” cool, Dern at his most bug-eyed, pattering “Great Gatsby” manic.

Nicholson is a Philadelphia radio host from the golden age of radio monologuists. He’s a considered, self-confessional storyteller — Jean Shepherd or Garrison Keillor without the laughs. He still lives with a grandfather (Charles LaVine) who mocks the stories he hears grandson David weave on the FM airwaves, with the story David is telling that opens the film a possible whopper about granddad and his two grandsons’ conspiring to let him choke on a fishbone.

There’s a message, a summons from Jason down Atlantic City way. “Get your ass down here fast! Our kingdom has come!”

David gets off the train, greeted by a fading beauty queen (Ellen Burstyn) in a “Welcome to Atlantic City” costume, accompanied by a decrepit five piece brass band.

Jason, it turns out, is in jail.

Dern devours the screen, shouting-down fellow inmates in the holding cell, bowling-over the viewer with his energy, his protests of “a misunderstanding” and that he can get this fellow “Louis” to make this all go away.

David? He’s got the resigned silence of the sibling who’s heard all this before.

“I love all the hustle around here,” Jason bellows. It’s out in the open!”

His latest scheme involves a developable island off the coast of Honolulu, some potential Japanese backers, and that mysterious “Louis,” whom David can never seem to track down.

Sally (Burstyn) is Jason’s paramour, staying in their pick of the aging, elegant and almost empty hotels of a tourist trap that’s trapped-out — we only ever see small clusters of little old ladies visiting — and off-season, to boot.

Beach towns in winter are always great settings, “Marvin Gardens” to “Ruby in Paradise” and beyond.

Sally’s aged out of her dream — kind of. Now she’s raised Jessica (Julia Anne Robinson) to be her next shot at Miss America.

In one bitterly funny scene, we get a taste of Sally’s “talent” as she plays the world’s largest organ in Atlantic City’s vast, pageant-friendly but empty “Boardwalk Hall” as David MC’s a fake beauty contest and Jessica tapdances to an older-than-old Irving Berlin number, “Steppin’ Out With My Baby.”

“I wish you didn’t think I was a part of all this,” she tells David. But she is, along with dizzy, desperate and short-tempered Sally, the antic Jason and everyone Jason can lure into his orbit.

David’s got a secret. And an obligation to try and help his brother, who can’t be satisfied with just deluding himself. Others have to believe, buy in and sign on. Maybe this time, his ship will really come in.

Nicholson’s the great reactor, here, unblinking at Dern’s boisterous sales pitches, tirades, threats and plots. Burstyn is an open wound, a victim of a faithless lover who is more interested in Jessica, a dreamer who has hitched her wagon to that last fellow dreamer to give her a second look.

The script suggests an ever-shrinking city and circle of hustles and hustlers — trading, making deals on faded hotels and attractions, or claiming that deals have already been made. The “Monopoly” allegory is pretty obvious, suggesting that it takes optimisim and chutzpah to play the game and win.

David? “He’s got only one thing,” Sally declares, ticking off that “one thing” on her fingers. “That’s depression, suspicion, and mistrust.”

Nicholson’s future “The Shining” co-star Scatman Crothers is impressive as maybe the one hustler/real-estate shuffler in town still drawing a crowd — to a strip club, back room gambling (pre-casinos) and who knows what else.

Rafelson, Nicholson’s pal and collaborater since The Monkees movie “Head,” wasn’t shy about laying on the surreal, from the daft “Welcome” ceremony for David at the train station to the faux pagaent to a random, wintry morning’s horseback ride on the beach as workmen labor over restoring the planks on the vast Boardwalk that made the city, and the board game, famous.

Rafelson is a big reason we say “They don’t make movies like this any more” and “The ’70s were the greatest decade in American cinema.”

“The King of Marvin Gardens” is quirky, downbeat and allegorical, a challenging film that unfolds with the patience of David’s opening (and interrupted) six minute monologue about himself, his brother, their grandfather and fishbones.

Its genre-defying oddness makes “Marvin Gardens” a stand-out credit in every career that participated in it. Bursytn’s run during this time included the even more nostalgic “The Last Picture Show” and the blockbuster, “The Exorcist.”

And Nicholson, the actor and secret screen-rewriter and scene-polisher, is a bespectacled wonder here, giving us no hint of the larger than life figure he hinted at in “Easy Rider” and eschewed in “Five Easy Pieces” and even “Chinatown.” The early ’70s were where he figured out he could make a big impact by underplaying.

The giant personality who would almost everywhelm in films from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” to “Terms of Endearment” and “The Departed” and “As Good as it Gets” would become a screen icon, but the actor who could make us come to him in “Five Easy Pieces,” “About Schmidt” and “Reds” was always there, as well.

As edgy and understated as “Five Easy Pieces” was, “The King of Marvin Gardens” comes off as even stranger with the passage of time. And as the years and fads and business cycles pass, the Atlantic City seen here loom even larger in the memory, a pre-bankrupt casinos wonderland before the post-Trump wasteland it became.

Rating: R, violence, nudity

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Bruce Dern, Ellen Burstyn, Julia Anne Robinson and Scatman Crothers.

Credits: Directed by Bob Rafelson, scripted by Jacob Brackman. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:43

Slick, sex-uped and maddeningly-shallow, “The Courier” is another variation on the “get rich quick via money-laundering” formula based on real events that roiled Europe and Spain in the early 2000s.

We learn precious little about the backers, reasons (real estate hustles, much of it financed by China) and economic perils of off-the-books cash-shuffling, because Daniel Calparsoso’s film — “The Warning” was his — is always in a mad rush to take us to the next night of clubbing with cocaine, the next posh sports car roll up (Porshes, Audis and AMGs) or the next sexual romp involving our anti-hero, Iván Márquez (Arón Piper), just another striver from Vallecas, a lowly parking valet who angles his way into the world of high rollers.

“El Correo/The Courier” tracks Iván’s abrupt introduction to this world and sudden rise in it without really getting into “details.”

The story is framed, as such tales inevitably are, within his downfall — showing up in a shipping container full of Euros.

Fast motion travel montages cover a lot of ground in those sports cars. And as he remembers his origins, we see Iván take up with the wife of one “financier (Laura Sepul) and the daughter (María Pedraza) of another (Spanish star Luis Tosar), and take on a bit of muscle (Nourdin Batan) as a “partner,” Piper voice-over narrates his character’s every inane thought.

“You know that one moment in life that can change everything…I was never the brightest kid in class” carries no more meaning in Spanish than it does dubbed into English.

The movie’s history, chronicling rapid development in the Spain of the 2000s, ending with Spain slumping back into the 20% unemployment that predated this “boom,” is disengenuous at best and barely sketched-in, mainly over the closing credits.

The settings have the sheen of affluence, the hedonistic sex of the very expensive underwear set and the world depicted is barely shown in a surface gloss. We know as little about our “forget his family/neglect his failed but righeous father” anti-hero at the end as we did at the beginning.

The more voice-over narration that winds through the soundtrack, the more I hated this facile, lazy exercise in excess.

Rating: TV-MA, some violence, sex, drugs, nudity, profanity

Cast: Arón Piper, María Pedraza, Laura Sepul, Nourdin Batan and Luis Tosar

Credits: Directed by Daniel Calparsoro, scripted by Patxi Amezcua and Alejo Flah. A Universal release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:39