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By the time somebody on screen finally acknowledges that somebody else in “Somebody I Used Know” is doing “some Julia Roberts ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ s–t,” we’re already way ahead of her and this movie.

That halfway-mark give-away is amusingly-late and amusingly-obvious in this slightly-raunchier-but-no-edgier riff on the classic “I gotta break up ‘Mister Right’s’ nuptials” rom-com.

That’s the last time I get to use “amusingly” in this review. The film, cooked up by the wife-and-husband team of Allison Brie and Dave Franco, embraces its source material, even mimicking the whole “disrupt a wedding but face no consequences” flaw at the heart of “My Best Friend’s.” It’s just that the laughs are few and far between and the “heart,” so important to a good rom-com, is left out altogether.

The ever-engaging Brie plays a dogged reality TV producer-hostess who has mastered the art of using silence in post-show interview segments to get cast members of “Dessert Island” to weep and confess their heart’s desires and their unhappiness at not achieving them.

Ally has just finished another season of the sex-and-sinfully-good-desserts “contest” series when network brass (Zoe Chao and Sam Richardson) shows up to cancel it. Her agent (Amy Sedaris) is little comfort.

There’s nothing for it but to traipse home, to her single mom (Julie Hagerty) whom she has neglected back in touristy, scenic Leavenworth, Washington, a bit of the Swiss Alps in the Pacific Northwest.

Ally is “Miss Hollywood” to the locals who remember her. It turns out, her ex-beau (Jay Ellis) is one of those who remembers her. And in a big way. A magical night of getting reacquainted ends when Ally stumbles into Sean’s family, getting ready for his wedding.

Damn. No, his “My bad” or its equivalent doesn’t excuse it.

But after chatting up the groom’s caring-but-goofy brother (Brie’s “Community” co-star, Danny Pudi), she starts to think she has a chance, that despite what brother Benny insists, “It’s NOT too late.”

“I need to see this through!”

Kiersey Clemons plays the punk-rocker, non-binary bride-to-be, the one who makes that “My Best Friend’s Wedding” accusation. So, it’s “game on” with each muttering “That bitch” at the other’s moves and counter moves.

The “karaoke scene” from “Wedding” is reprised here as a dare that forces Ally to show everyone her way of rapping/singing DIY songs about a current situation, mentioning by name everybody in that moment with her.

It’s clever and cute — with Brie improvising new lyrics to “Semi-Charmed Kind of Life” by Third Eye Blind — even if it never comes close to the heart-touching delight of that “Wedding” moment. That kind of goes for the entire film.

Haley Joel Osment plays another sibling of Sean’s mostly-adopted family, a married goofball who’s all into dated Hollywood references (“The Office,” etc). He finds a laugh or two, as does Hagerty, playing a mom who has taken a lover and doesn’t interrupt their couplings just because her neglectful, self-absorbed adult daughter is visiting.

Everybody else? A lot of usually funny people are in this, but nobody has anything all that amusing to say or do. Wasting Chao, Richardson and Sedaris this way is a criminal offense.

Even Brie, leaning HARD into a sort of lovelorn-and-clueless Kristen Wiig characterization, has as much trouble finding laughs as she does grabbing hold of the heart of the movie.

The best scenes involve Ally questioning, deceiving and then bonding with Clemons’ “Cassidy.” That’s kind of sweet, but concentrating on that relationship at the expense of your supposed love connection, Sean, is a sign that you’ve pretty much missed the point. Or miscast.

And no, a big nude scene or two doesn’t “patch” this hole in the heart of your romantic comedy.

Rating: R for sexual content, graphic nudity, language throughout and brief drug use.

Cast: Allison Brie, Kiersey Clemens, Jay Ellis, Haley Joel Osment, Julie Hagerty and Danny Pudi.

Credits: Directed by Dave Franco, scripted by Allison Brie and Dave Franco. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:44

It bowls the viewer over with ham-fisted, theatrical excess, a grandiose exclamation point on the tail end of the Golden Age of screen satire.

Peter Barnes sees to it that his class-eviscerating theatrical talk-a-thon “The Ruling Class” makes it to the screen with the dagger still bloody, although the blood’s somewhat dry on the blade.

On the stage three years before Monty Python’s hilarious and pointed “Upper Class Twit of the Year” contest, on the screen a year or so after that was telecast, director Peter Medak’s not wholly stagebound, ever-so-quotable film version feels stodgy and stale, half a century later.

It’s not the content, the idea of sending up the inbred Etonian/Oxbridge/House of Lords Brits whose “born to rule” privilege is still with us, even though Britain is once again questioning those Hanoverian “Windsors” and the ermine-caped and coddled DNA’s “divine right of kings.” Barnes’ play earned a Nicholas Hytner/James McAvoy revival just a few years back.

The “classic” film? It’s something of a stiff. Built around a madness, heavy makeup and Bloody Marys turn by Peter O’Toole, it finishes with a savage flourish. But the two hours-plus bore that precedes that remains, as they say in the UK, “a bit much.”

Lord Gurney (Harry Andrews), a widowed, titled nobleman and army veteran, dies during an accident that would have exposed the way he got his jollies, had that sort of thing ever become public. His autoerotic asphyxiation while in his dress uniform and cap — and a ballet tutu — goes awry. And just as he was planning to remarry and sire a fresh heir.

Why? The idea of his “mad” son inheriting the title, the seat in the House of Lords and the magnificent pile (Harlaxton Manor was the filming location) and estate is unthinkable to his brother Charles (William Mervyn), and Lord Gurney himself had to give some thought to protecting the family’s bloodline-based privilege.

But the lord gets-off in mysterious ways, and dies, with a big chunk of cash going to charity, a bigger one to his faithful manservant Tucker (Arthur Lowe), and everything else going to wayward Jack.

A man who has worn a monk’s habit, his hair and beard long and a beatific glow about his face for nearly ten years, who thinks he is Jesus “Mark II,” will become Jack Arnold Alexander Tancred Gurney, 14th Earl of Gurney.

Just don’t call him (O’Toole) “Jack.”

With Uncle Charles, his wife Lady Claire (Coral Browne), their nob of a son (James Villiers) and the obliging local C of E bishop (the great Alastair Sim) present, let the debate about the new lord’s “fitness” for his inheritance begin. How does his know he’s truly the Father, Son and Holy Ghost?

“Simple. When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself.“

But but but…surely this cannot stand! Even having “Jack” explained to them by his “foreign” doctor (Michael Bryant) and others, can’t lessen the blow.

“Remember he’s suffering from delusions of grandeur. In reality he’s an earl, an English aristocrat, a member of the ruling class. Naturally, he’s come to believe there’s only one person grander than that: the Lord God Almighty Himself.”

This Jesus naps upon a cross and beams when he talks of love and blessings, the wonders of “His” world. He fails utterly to inspire his relatives to evolve into better people, or to give up their schemes to displace him, or at least marry him off so that another “heir” can be produced and he can be sent back to the “looney bin.”

“We think you should take a wife.”

“Who from?”

The manservant Tucker, more “outspoken” but still on the job after receiving his newly-won wealth, just shrugs at this latest upper class twit.

“Yes, he’s a nutcase. Most of these titled fleabags are. Rich nobs and privileged arseholes can afford to be bonkers. They’re living in a dreamworld, aren’t they, sir? Life’s made too easy for ’em. They don’t have to earn a livin’, so they do just what they want to.”

Director Peter Medak, a refugee from communist Hungary, may have had insights on this “Bolshie” satire of class and privilege. But he shows little flair for comedy or comic blocking. The film never breaks free from that “stagebound” feel. Every scene runs past its payoff with most of the first two acts playing as an endless succession of “let’s not get to the point/the good stuff just yet” prevarications.

There are occasional wacky breaks for a little song and dance, “The Varsity Rag,” public school songs and the like. They’re rather blandly translated to the screen.

The “He thinks he’s Jesus” joke is campy enough, but flogging it to death is a sin. What we stick around for is the fading hope that eventually this nutter will be “accepted” because “We understand each other perfectly. Breeding speaks to breeding.” Jack is just “a little eccentric, perhaps.”

And when he’s “accepted” we doubt he’ll have any trouble fitting in with his fellow “eccentrics” in the House of Lords.

With rank having its privileges, no effort will be spared to provide Jack with a “cure” via a fellow headcase who bills himself as “The High Voltage Messiah” (Nigel Green),.Charles’ mistress (Carolyn Seymour) will be persuaded to marry him.

Madness will be shrugged off, a murder will be covered-up thanks to great wealth’s ability to hide behind the Church and school connections and class. If that sounds dispiritingly “present day,” that’s kind of the point.

The film divided critics and awards groups in its day, but there’s no denying its impact. It was a flop. O’Toole would enter his own “years in the wilderness” that even the cult hit “The Stunt Man” couldn’t end. It would take “My Favorite Year” to truly begin his own third act.

Medak would never be entrusted with anything of this scale again. He’d go on to film “The Krays” and “Romeo is Bleeding” and a lot of American TV.

The movie they left behind, a production launched — mid-bender — when O’Toole secured the rights and could add it to his “Man from La Mancha” schedule, remains a curious and endlessly quotable artifact.

If the play’s as timeless as Hytner maintained it is, it’s a pity the director of “The Madness of King George” didn’t take a crack at making a film using his West End production as a jumping off point.

But perhaps he figured out what O’Toole, Medak and Barnes didn’t, way back when. This sort of talky, madcap-but-myopic satire only works on the stage, where the many pauses allow the many pithy punchlines to become laughlines and the live audience helps carry the load.

Rating: PG, innuendo, scatological humor

Cast: Peter O’Toole, Alastair Sim, Carolyn Seymour, Arthur Lowe, Coral Browne, William Mervyn, James Villiers, Michael Bryant and Harry Andrews.

Credits: Directed by Peter Medak, scripted by Peter Barnes, based on his play. An Avco Embassy release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:33

A woman’s troubled psychological journey begins at what might be her final destination in “Stromboli,” a Dutch self-help dramedy of the “Eat, Pray Love” variety, performed in English.

It’s a vigorously edited-down version of the novel by Saskia Noort, a Dutch writer known for thrillers, that touches on childhood trauma, adult guilt and what happens after the breaking point that sends our heroine — Sara — fleeing for a volcanic island escape.

A lightweight, hedonistic opening that suggests this “Eat Pray” will be reduced to binge drinking and boinking, pardon my English. But in short order we see that this isn’t “escape” for Sara (Elise Schaap of “Valentino”). it’s a mad, heedless flight. She’s running from something awful, and her flashbacks only hint at what that might be.

A drunken Sara acts-out on the ferry to Stromboli, which we gather she’s visited before. She’s climbing on the railings, and grabbing the snack bar cook for a rough-and-ready quickie back in the kitchen.

Staggering ashore, she renews her acquaintance with the old gent who rents her a cliffside cottage, and her friendship with his donkey, Gustav. She fills her mineral water bottle with vodka, staggers to the volcanic beach and all but dozes off between volcanic tremors.

A paler-than-pale British stranger (Tim McInnerny of “Notting Hill” and “Blackadder”) staggers up, and they strike up a brief, boozy friendship, one that ends when he returns to his “group.” Sara, meanwhile, has lost her bag — all her money, ID and phone. She has to break into the cottage, which she drunkenly trashes. That gets her kicked out, and there’s only so much pub crawling she can do on the barter system.

Awakening in a church, she is “rescued” by Jens (Christian Hillborg), who takes her home to his little hotel. It’s now a retreat for people looking for a sort of life-cleanse, a psychological detox in which giving up booze, etc., for their stay is merely “urged” not ordered.

Jens and Thandi (Neerja Naik) are gurus/counselors. This is where Harold (McInnerny) belonged, with Anna Chancellor, Pieter Embrechts, Taz Munyaneza and others in his “group.” Troubled Sara, dodging calls from the husband she insists she’s dumped, unable to reach her 14 year-old daughter, is added to the activities — group dance, group meals and role-playing group therapy.

You can guess some of what follows. Everybody has a secret shame/sorrow/regret. Some folks will “couple” up. And the role-playing that helps them come to grips with it is pretty traumatizing and extreme in nature. Some will have breakthroughs, but not before Sara acts-out some more — sleeping around, snorting this, insulting that.

The most impressive element to this Michiel van Erp film (“Open Seas” was his) is the way it shifts direction and tone so abruptly that it could give you whiplash. One minute, we’re staggering through the streets of town with Sara and the donkey Gustav enlisted as her pack animal, and the next she’s reluctantly falling into “let’s get to work on YOU.”

Unlike the novel, we don’t see what she went through that put her on that ferry, three sheets to the wind. Joining the story already in progress (in media res) makes it more interesting and more challenging. As Schaap makes a beguiling drunk, we buy in and start to figure out what’s going on.

Others may have more tolerance of “the process” that she finds herself immersed in, its self-help speak and discomfiting, lawsuit-inviting “shock therapy.” The picture wades into that and lost me, or at least lost my interest.

More could have been managed with the “eruption” metaphor that the Stromboli setting invites. Tremors, and all Sara and Harold can agree on is that if this is indeed “the big one,” no one will miss him and her daughter “will be glad” she’s gone.

I appreciated the film’s brisk, breezy way of introducing characters and getting down to business in “treating” their trauma. But I missed that lighter tone, which frankly would have suited the goofy nature of the therapy that Sara endures to get her to reveal and then let go of her “secret.” As “deep” as they wanted to treat this story, it’s never more than a facile, glib gloss of trauma and its treatment.

Mental health is no joke. But ways of treating it can be, and that’s the only kind of “closure” an 85 minute dramedy with sex and drugs and funny drunks and possibly unlicensed therapist “gurus” can provide.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug and alcohol abuse, sex, nudity profanity

Cast: Elise Schaap, Christian Hillborg, Anna Chancellor, Pieter Embrechts, Taz Munyaneza, Neerja Naik and Tim McInnerny

Credits: Michiel van Erp, scripted by Roos Ouwehand and Paula van der Oest, based on a novel by Saskia Noort. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

As dark as “The Grifters,” as over-the-top as “The Sting,” “Sharper” is a fresh take on a time-tested genre, a “Who can you trust?” tale from the Land of the Big Con.

No, you’re never wholly sure of who’s grifting whom, sometimes to an eye-rolling degree. Maybe the opening image, of a Rolex watch being re-assembled, is a tad on-the-nose, previewing the profligate riches and the clockwork plot to come.

But an outstanding cast headed by Oscar winner Julianne Moore and fresh faces Justice Smith and Briana Middleton, and lifted by bring-it-all-home reliables Sebastian Stan and John Lithgow, make this a thoroughly entertaining winner about predators who make everybody they meet a loser.

An opening credit defines a “sharper” as “someone who lives by their wits,” and creates expectations for every character and every storyline to follow.

That opening “meet cute” in a bookstore? Is lovely “single and I like it” grad student Sandra (Middleton, of “The Tender Bar”) who she seems to be? Is bookstore manager Tom (Smith of the “Jurassic Worlds” and TV’s “The Get Down”) for real?

We watch their romance unfold and wait for a shoe to drop, that first “problem” that only somebody else’s money can solve. No, that’s not a particularly hard to guess secret. But the clockwork con is more of a vehicle for a series of engrossing character studies which follow.

Sandra’s back story is explored, as is Tom’s. Then we meet Max (Stan). And figure out his connection to “Madeline” (Moore).

All along the way, somebody’s playing somebody else. Someone is being groomed by a predator, someone else given a “make over” as part of a mentoring. Every connection is tenuous but essential to making this Rolex — OK “Fauxlex” — tick over.

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A single mom nags her teen son into getting up and out the door to school. As an Aussie, she’s got one ultimatum that works every time.

“No school, no ‘footie.'”

They arrive, and she stays on campus with him. She’s a cop, and this is where she’s assigned.

But today is the day that justifies why police are assigned to schools where gun rights overrule human rights, as far as kids are concerned. “Active shooter!”

Today is the day everyone finds out how Policewoman Samantha Romans (Nadine Garner) reacts in such a situation. She calls for backup, draws her firearm and freezes. She weeps and cowers as kids flee all around her.

Her own son is among the 20 killed. Is his death the beginning of her torment, or the culmination of it?

Actor-turned-director Scott Major and screenwriter Christopher Gist take a flier on coming to grips with how people respond to the shock and terror of life-threatening danger, and bury that in a far-fetched thriller, “Line of Fire,” which was titled “Darklands” when it was released Down Under.

They flip the script, making Samantha the victim in a scenario that is common in American gunlands, where gun manufacturers, gun lobbyists and gun fetishists bend cowardly politicians into accepting that “cops in the schools” is the solution to an unregulated, often-deranged civilian subculture awash in machine guns.

How do you make a policewoman the victim? Not just by explaining “how these things happen.” As Samantha’s superior throws her under the bus (“She let everyone down.”), harassing phone calls and shouted insults from drive-bys begin.

And then that villain of the right wing gun culture sticks her nose in. Jamie is a laid-off print journalist hellbent on returning to relevance by getting Samantha to talk. Jamie (Samantha Tolj) smacks her lips over the payday that will lead to, the web traffic she can gin up for her website. She will not take “No” for an answer.

Her persistence turns into the ugliest harassment imaginable — shaming, blunt assessments of how Sam is being perceived, lies about how “I understand guilt,” published online taunts and then texting her quarry the crime scene photo of what a semi-automatic weapon did to her teen son’s face.

We barely have time to be appalled at this over-the-top terrorizing when out filmmakers flip the script again. Sam quickly concocts an absurdly detailed plan for revenge that will make her tormentor experience what she went through.

There’s merit in exploring just what leads to that “Lord Jim” moment when any person — soldier, sailor, police officer or civilian — finds out what we’re really made of. The psychology of panic, the knee-buckling terror of facing great peril to do the noble thing and try to save others makes for gripping drama, and in the case of mass shootings, fascinating “good guy with a gun” myth-busting.

But what Major and Gist have concocted trivializes the trauma with every “This reporter is the crazy one” and “She has that coming to her” turn.

Tense scenes of violence are undercut by the extremes that the shattered Sam indulges to in securing her vengeance. Her “particular skills” go far beyond that one expertise every cop on Earth carries into work each day, knowing the system and the people in it well enough to know just what one can get away with, and how.

“Line of Fire” can be unsettling and even wrenching when this or that aspect of the inciting tragedy is touched on and the viewer allowed the grace to consider what anyone — even someone trained to handle such scenarios — would face in such a situation.

But it stumbles from eye-rolling to infuriating all the way to risible as the filmmakers turn professional failure into armed and trained victimhood, and then into savage “learn your lesson” revenge.

Whatever merits this failed morality tale might have had are lost as it lurches into the ludicrous. The real shame here is worth pointing at the people who made this.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Nadine Garner, Samantha Tolj, Brett Cousins, Nicholas Coghlan and Texas Watterston.

Credits: Directed by Scott Major, scripted by Christopher Gist. A VMI Worldwide release.

Running time: 1:44

Aussie actress Krew Boylan turns out to be a better Dolly Parton impersonator than screenwriter in “Seriously Red,” her self-scripted star vehicle. It’s a self-serious and seriously-confusing identity crisis comedy tucked into what might have been a gender role romp of the “Connie & Carla” variety.

Boylan can Smoky Mountain drawl like Dolly, and offer a fair impression of Parton’s keening Appalachian soprano. But the movie she’s built around her redheaded stepchild of a character is too sexual to be cutesy, and too cutesy to have anything like the edge that seems to have been Boylan’s intent.

We meet “Red” at a “serious misunderstanding.” She’s a real estate assessor who isn’t really making it at work. And for some reason, she’s shown up at the company office party in full Dolly regalia. She’s been obsessed with her since her tweens.

What starts off like a painfully awkward “misread the room” moment can only be turned around by remembering whatever Dolly Partonism — those little pearls that Country Music’s Living Saint has been dropping since she became famous — applies.

“Storms make trees with deeper roots,” maybe? “If you don’t like the road you’re walkin’, start pavin’ a new one!”

“Red” launches into “9 to 5” and saves the day, only to get carried away and fired the next day.

But opportunity knocks in the form of “Teeth” (Celeste Barber), a manager of “tribute performers” like “The World’s Best Impersonator,” a Kenny Rogers (Daniel Webber) act that gets by mainly on facial hair. He barely sounds like Kenny.

What’s a Kenny without a Dolly? Let’s team them up and take this show to Hong Kong! Just don’t ask “Teeth” how she got her nickname, and where her spare set ended up growing.

Has Red finally found what she’s good at? Might Kenny, who is DEEP into character and DEEP into Dolly, be “the one?” How deep might Red go to “become” her idol?

And will Red’s disapproving single Mum (Jean Kitson) finally give her a little credit and a little peace?

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This Aussie indie film is about a teen with Down Syndrome who doesn’t let social expectations or her brother’s concerns keep her from meeting her ambitions.

Hope the patrons of the Willie Jones Public Library appreciate “Poppy.”

Movie Nation, spreading cinema across the southeast, one movies one small public library at a time.

“Race” never figured in the comedies, thrillers and dramas of the great Austrian-American filmmaker Billy Wilder. You can wade through his entire 50 year career and wonder why you never see a Black face.

The rest of his industry in his adoptive home found places to at least recognize American diversity, even in subservient roles — waiters, porters, entertainers, etc. Not Wilder. “Double Indemnity,” “Ace in the Hole,” “Some Like It Hot,” his films can feel “erased” if you look at them through that lens.

And it’s not like he deserves “credit” when he finally made race and Black characters a part of his comic universe in “The Fortune Cookie.” A movie that came out years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s like he was half-heartedly jumping on the bandwagon just as it was finally leaving town.

The film is celebrated as the first teaming of the great comic duo Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, for finally tapping into Matthau’s comic grump persona and winning him an Academy Award. Lemmon and Matthau would go on to team up in nine films, Lemmon would direct his pal in one and act in Matthau’s son’s “The Grass Harp” with him.

But here’s what I distinctly remember about first watching “The Fortune Cookie” on TV as a child. A CBS Sports TV cameraman (Lemmon) gets bowled over on the sidelines of a Cleveland Browns game. His shyster lawyer brother-in-law, “Whiplash Willie” (Matthau) talks him into faking debilitating injuries and suing.

And despite his best efforts, the dogged insurance company investigator Purkey (Cliff Osmond) can’t unmask the fakery, despite staking-out and bugging the injured man’s apartment.

The cameraman, Harry Hinkle, has a conscience, and he sees what this scam is doing to the unknowing footballer (Ron Rich) who fears he has paralyzed the victim for life. The only thing that gets Harry up out of that chair is his outrage when Purkey baits him by calling his new friend a “coon” with a “Cadillac.” Harry decks the racist.

It seems such an obvious “the least he could do” scripted action now, 57 years after “The Fortune Cookie” came out. But it was startling enough to stand out and inform the way the movie sits in the memory, at least for some of us.

As for Wilder, “the least he could do” after making a sizable portion of America invisible for his entire career was to cast Rich, in what would become his biggest role, cast the boxer Archie Moore as running back/kick returner Luther “Boom Boom” Jackson’s dad, and give Boom Boom a story arc and agency, making him a compelling victim at the heart of this “harmless” comic scam.

Watching now, I’m touched by Rich’s sensitive and athletic turn — Boom Boom loses his love for the game and crawls into a bottle thanks to this accident. A guilt-stricken star athlete finds himself turned into Harry’s Black nurse and manservant, and Harry sees it, too, and starts to feel shame for it.

And then you take in the narrow scope of Rich’s career and remember just how difficult it was just to get even a day gig on film or TV in an era which we celebrate for letting Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Bill Cosby, James Earl Jones and Diahann Carroll break through.

I went into this re-viewing of “The Fortune Cookie” expecting to focus on The Making of Matthau, a mostly-dramatic actor who honked, bellowed and mugged his way into a persona that took over his career with this Oscar-winning turn.

Fast-talking “Whiplash Willie” has a dozen precedents to fling at the insurance company representing the Cleveland Browns, the NFL and Municipal Stadium. He gives everybody — wife, family, kids, nurses and Harry Hinkle the bum’s rush. He bulldozes them with his shtick, his certitude and his manic sales pitch.

“l don’t want my brother-in-law to be a nobody. I wanna see you in a fastback Mustang, Italian silk suits, a decent apartment, a go-go baby all the way!”

“Think of your mother. Think of your mother, Harry. Bronchitis every winter. She shouldn’t be in Cleveland. She should be in Florida, baking her chest!”

Lemmon’s twitchy, antic put-upon Everyman act got him through the ’50s (“Mister Roberts,” “Some Like It Hot,””The Apartment”). We see him aging into the Felix Unger of legend here, paired-up with the blowhard who’d become his perfect comic foil.

“Of course he’s upset. He’s a lawyer – he’s paid to be upset.”

Wilder and his longtime co-writer I.A.L. Diamond concocted a crooked caper that had roles for many a comic character actor, some of them (Sig Rumond as a “specialist” from “Vienna”) dating back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. William Christopher, billed as “Bill,” was years away from his role as the priest on TV’s “M*A*S*H,” when he played a young and insulted young internist here, and Howard McNear put down his “Andy Griffith Show” barber’s scissors to play another client of Whiplash Willie.

That gives the snarky, one-liner-laced script a hint of “screwball” about it.

They filmed this in black and white, which made mid-winter Cleveland even more “Cleveland,” and realistic. They scored something a lot harder to land for such “edgy” subject matter today, the full cooperation of the NFL. If you want to remember the glory that was Keith Jackson announcing a game in the booth, here he is in his salad days.

But beyond the monochromatic cinematography, there’s something faintly dispirited about it all, as if the movie — or at least the guy who made it — felt a little guilt about the “victimless crime” his movie is about, and a racist society’s victims he finally got around to acknowledging existed with this 1966 classic.

“The Fortune Cookie” still plays as funny. Not as funny as “One, Two, Three,” his grandest farce, or the more celebrated “Some Like It Hot.” Matthau makes it amusing. But there’s just a sliver of hope and the tiniest hint of “bittersweet” about it, something Wilder occasionally allowed into his screenplays.

The Old World filmmaker would basically slip into nostalgia after “The Fortune Cookie,” remaking “The Front Page,” setting a couple of his final films in Europe and becoming a Grand Old Man of the Cinema even before he hung it up. But just as in the beginning of his career, his latter years saw him never put another Black actor on screen again.

I wonder if Cameron Crowe, who idolized him and got to know him, ever asked him why that was?

Rating: “passed,” smoking, adult situations

Cast: Jack Lemmon Walter Matthau, Ron Rich, Judi West, Sig Rumond and Cliff Osmond.

Credits: Directed by Billy Wilder, scripted by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder. A United Artists release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:05

“True Spirit” is a plucky feel-good tale of a teen girl’s quest to be the youngest to ever sail “Around Alone.” Directed and acted with a light touch, packed with bubbly pop music montages and finished off with a dollop of deep sea melodrama, what this “You sail like a girl” lacks in surprises it makes up in heart.

As any old salt would tell you, sailing solo around the world is the ultimate test of a seafarer. Australian Jessica Watson set her mind on doing it in her tweens and took her shot at being the youngest ever to solo circumnavigate in her teens.

She was inspired by Jesse Martin, who finished his “nonstop/unassisted” circumnavigation in 1999, in his late teens. Watson would do it even younger. Using the same world class bluewater yacht, a Sparkman & Stephens 34 footer, she’d set out in 2009 from her home port of Sydney, Australia, with the goal of making history.

Aylya Brown plays the very young Jessica, daughter of an unconventional Australian family, taught to sail young, a child with goals and her eye on one reluctant old salt (Cliff Curtis) who might be her coach, a veteran offshore racer with a bit of sailing PTSD about a race that went wrong.

He’s a fictional character based on Jessica’s real coach, Bruce Arms, but exaggerated for cinematic effect. Curtis is perfectly engaging in the part.

The teenaged Jessica is played by Teagan Croft of “Titans,” sort of the prototypical winsome Aussie blonde of film, TV, tennis and surfing competitions.

The teen Jessica never shook the more childish Jessica’s chip on her shoulder, that “No one thinks I’m big or strong enough to do anything.”

She’d show them. She’d show us. She rounded up sponsors, a boat, the requisite sailing experience to attempt this “world record” (there are rules) and a lot of controversy.

Think about how much you worry about your teen driving on her or his own at that age, the carelessness/recklessness every parent fears. Now imagine letting her tackle “the four capes” and the perils — gigantic waves, ship traffic, etc — of the Southern Ocean in a small sailboat far out of the reach of help.

There were doubters, child welfare workers and public officials in Australia who wanted to stop this excessive bit of free range parenting. And then there’s the snide TV reporter (Todd Lasance) who seems to revel in her every misstep.

Taking a nap while on an overnight on a trial run offshore in “Ella’s Pink Lady,” she collides with an offshore freighter, which becomes press conference news.

No matter. Jessica will not give up “the magic and allure of the sea.” Her mother (Oscar winner Anna Paquin, no stranger to this Girl Powered Genre herself, thanks to “Fly Away Home”) tells her to “celebrate the moments, and don’t forget to dance in the rain.”

Her coach, who will be in sat-phone contact with her daily, tells her to “sing” to relieve the tedium. “We’re sailors. It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

She’ll record video along the way, her big sister will run her blog and she’ll be an inspiration to girls everywhere…if she makes it.

There are cute bits — the “Toast to King Neptune” ritual of crossing the equator (a requirement of any “around alone” attempt) — David Bowie sing-alongs (her coach lives aboard his yacht, “Bowie).

And there are hints of life passing by back on shore while Jessica is fighting storms, being becalmed in the doldrums, communing with whales and patching the boat.

Solo circumnavigations have been a thing since Joshua Slocum set out from Boston in 1895. By the 1960s, it had become a sailing endurance race, and the “Five Oceans” race is held every four years since the 1980s.

But as we learn every so often, it can end in tragedy. There have been films about Donald Crowhurst’s ill-fated attempt and about the first “youth” circumnavigation, Robin Lee Graham’s five year adventure (ports of call, romance, pet cats), “The Dove.” It’s even been the narrative hook for a refugee drama.

“True Spirit” doesn’t add anything fresh to the genre, just fresh faces and Aussie pluck, with even the tunes — girl-powered “Brighter Than the Sun” (an anachronism, as it came out two years after “Pink” set sail) and the Bowie choice– pretty much on the nose.

But that’s what “feel good” movies often are, comfort food, with the occasional surprise, a “darkest hour,” a little pathos and a lot of heart.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Teagan Croft, Cliff Curtis, Josh Lawson, Aylya Brown and Anna Paquin

Credits: Directed by Sarah Spillane, scripted by Cathy Randall, Rebecca Banner and Sarah Spillane, based on the memoir by Jessica Watson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Stumbling across this lightly-amusing comedy on Roku, there are certain “truths” that are, as Mr. Jefferson would have noted, “self-evident.”

“We Are Not Alone” plays like a sitcom pilot, which it almost certainly is, a 90 minute set up for a series about life under alien occupation.

And the screenwriters must have watched Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and it’s dorkier descendent, “Red Dwarf,” and adored them. It looks and plays like a tonier, modern production values ’80s Britcom, a fish-out-of-water tale of brusque, occupying aliens and the unlikely human they use as their intermediary in occupying Brexittania, the Jolly Olde land of wordplay, interspecies sex jokes and the like.

But the fascinating subtext to all this is colonialism. Yes, those master colonizers, cultural-appropriators and inventors and popularizers or the world’s greatest racial slurs see what it’s like to be occupied by a “superior” race, one that isn’t really so superior after all.

It begins almost precisely like “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” in the Seven Bells pub in tiny Clitheroe, where assistant local planner Stewart (Declan Baxter) is resisting efforts by his more ambitious mate (Dane Baptiste) to apply for a promotion.

“Stew” is the classic “Keep my head down” functionary, timid and content to put in his hours and get by. All that changes when they stroll outside, missing TV reports about what’s just starting, and mate Jordan is disintegrated when a spherical probe plunges to Earth.

“We come in peace,” it beams in friendly lit-up letters across its surface.

Aliens are invading — hovering airships, patrolling drones, soldiers in “Battlestar Galactica” armor, the works.

Weeks later, the shock is still with one and all, the “We are Not Alone” headlines still lingering on the last newspaper’s front page.

The Internet is gone. You can’t drive your Mini Cooper because attempting to start it produces a shock. And the aliens, whom the locals have taken to calling “Blue Man Group” or “Smurfs,” have simply taken over.

“Under New Management.”

Showing up for work, Stew is appalled that the officious, somewhat bumbling blue-faced/blue-wigged Tories have decided to run Occupied Britain from Clitheroe, which, let’s face it, is A), not “LON-DON,” B) is a nevertheless a real British town and C), one with a funny name calling to mind a sex organ.

“You can’t run the country from here!” Stewart protests. But he’d best keep his head about him. Everybody over him on the local, national and global totem pole is “unavailable,” having been shoved out of an airlock from the orbiting death disc circling the planet.

The aliens adapt the accent and language of whatever “sector” they’re governing — China, Russia, US. Here, they’re “Yes, Minister” fussbudget-o-crats fighting turf wars with the Russian occupiers, the Chinese occupation zone, the Americas, etc. And they have a lot of questions.

“Is there anything else we should know?”

“You INVADED our planet!” “ARRIVED. And we were ‘invited.”

That’s the nature of a lot of the conversations, the “new management” trying to figure out what “money” is and how to run an “economy,” Stewart tamping down his outrage as he’s given a “consultant” job — one where termination might mean “termination.” He’s also given a big house and a lot of “colored paper” (money) for selling out his species. But every now and then, he can’t help but blurt out his true feelings.

“You blew up NEW ZEALAND!”

“Only the edges.”

Still, the new overlords aren’t rocket scientists or even very observant sociologists. They have advanced weapons, which can’t fully charge on the “grid” of their new colony. The sector premiere (Vicki Pepperdine), her even-more-authoritarian subcommander (Mike Wozniak) and bumbling third in command (Joe Thomas) may have all the tech, holograms, and may take on British-ish names — “Traytor,” “GOR-DAN” and “Greggs” — but they’re going to need help getting local compliance.

Which is where Stew comes in.

But when the fetching local barmaid (Georgia May Foote) gives him the eye for the first time ever, he should smell a rat. The AAA, “Anti-Alien Alliance,” needs his help to “steal the plans” and set their “Independence Day/Star Wars, Episode IV” blow-up-the-spaceship-and-liberate-themselves plan in motion.

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