Movie Nation

“Rye Lane” has all the ingredients of a classic romantic comedy. All of them.

It starts with a “meet cute,” introduces a morose, just-dumped guy to a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, compresses time into (mostly) a magical single day walking-and-talking “date” through a colorful corner of the world, hits all the comically wrong notes in karaoke moment and finishes with a Grand Romantic Gesture.

First-time feature director Raine Allen Miller and writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia immerse us in Brixton, South London. And they and their stars Vivian Oparah and David Jonsson upend a few rom-com conventions and improve on a few others in the most delightfully charming screen romance in ages.

The “meet cute” is in a public toilet, with the camera tracking over the tops of the various stalls to zero in on weepy Dom in his pink Converse and Beats, and brassy stranger Yas trying to comfort him from from the next “unisex” stall.

She’s a Manic Pixie Black London Girl, and apparently determined to press this “random” for details of his “mess.”

“EVERYBODY has a mess,” she reassures him.

And over the course of a day, walking the crowded, colorful streets, watching OAPs (old age pensioners) learning tai chi in a park, eating street food and extending the day with an “Oh, I’m going this way too” every so often, we flash back to his messy breakup, and even get around to hers.

It’s like The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” as a rom-com. It’s all cute and charming and “real,” and bloody adorable.

Allen handles every flashback to this “sign” (red flag) that things weren’t going well in the previous relationship, or that red letter date when it was officially “over” differently. There are quick, literal recreations and longer, comically-idealized “I WISH it had happened this way” takes.

One even has Yas acting out her theatrical break-up on stage in front of a theater packed with Doms.

But he’s an accountant, shorthand for “boring” even if you’re Black, even in the UK. And she’s an aspiring costume designer, hoping for a big break, shorthand for bubbly, upbeat and force of nature. Can this go anywhere?

We’ve seen scores of other versions of her impose-herself-on-his “first time seeing my ex with my ex-best friend, who cheated on me” meet-up. Oparah turns it into a hilarious napalming of the beautiful but faithless ex (Karene Parker) and the dopey, handsome lout (Benjamin Sarpong-Broni) she preferred to Dom.

The set-up is a cliche, the characters reduced to “types,” and playing the hell out of it makes it a spit-take riot.

I loved the way the film peels away layers of hurt for each character, inverts their roles as Dom — in time-honored Manic Pixie Dream Girl rom-com style — becomes the bubbly, outgoing one for a bit and Yas becomes the passive, quiet one, reliving old pain.

But Oparah was born to be this brash, her every bit of banter worth watching with subtitles so that every bite of Cockney-Creole slang can be savored.

“He was tryin’ to DILUTE my squash, and I was like ‘NOT TODAY, Satan!'”

There are hijinks to be had, a Jamaican backyard cookout to be crashed, confrontations to come and wisdom to be shared, most of it from the lady who is sure “EVERYbody has a mess!”

“There are two types of people in the world, the ones who wave (back at people waving at them from) boats, and people who hate joy!”

And then, a “Wait, WHAT?” cameo pops up, a random moment in a movie built on them that rivals media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s appearance in “Annie Hall.”

Let’s just say there’s a burrito shop worth stopping by on their walk. It’s called “Love Guac’tually.” And the grizzled burrito maker would make Jane Austen spit out her Fanta.

This Sundance darling would have been a perfect Valentine’s Day date-movie release. But that would’ve been rushing things. Searchlight/Disney have their hands on one of the best rom-coms in years, and it may take a while to build buzz for it.

So here’s that buzz. The film opens March 31. Remember it, make a note. And wait for that cameo. It’s a hoot, and one among many in this slice of romantic life along “Rye Lane.”

Rating: R, sexual situations, profanity, toilet humor

Cast: David Jonsson, Vivian Oparah, Karene Parker, Poppy Allen-Quarmby, Benjamin Sarpong-Broni and Simon Manyonda

Credits: Directed by Raine Allen Miller, scripted by Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:22

The Carnegie award-winning children’s novel “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents” makes its way to the screen more or less intact in a delightful and sometimes droll British animated film, “The Amazing Maurice.”

Created originally for Sky TV in the UK but coming to theaters in the US via Viva Kids, it features Hugh Laurie as the voice of the “sentient cat” who ate the wrong thing and learned to talk and run a Big Con the length and breadth of what appears to be 18th century Britain.

Can you imagine Hugh Laurie as “The Music Man?” Of course you can, right here in Liverpool City!

The rotund tabby — funny character design — shows up in a town unchanged since the Tudors and gives the locals the hard sell spiel about “rat INFESTATION,” romping through taverns and barns crawling with rodents, rhyming couplets with a carnival barker’s zeal. Friends, you have TROUBLE.

Surely “Amazing Maurice” is the answer to the infestation?

“Well, I am good, it’s true, but no no NO! One cat will NEVER do!”

There’s nothing for it but for his friend the piper, Keith (Himesh Patel) to be summoned and hired, leading the rats to the riverside with his mesmerizing tune.

When the locals have paid up, the rats swim ashore downstream and Maurice gives everybody his cut.

These rats are THESPIANS, with the hammy Sardines (Joe Sugg) doing the old soft shoe, and Peaches (Gemma Arterton) selling the whole transfixed by the piper shtick. Darktan (Ariyon Bakare) organizes everybody like a rat sergeant or rat union shop steward, and wise Dangerous Beans (David Tennant) preaches of the “island paradise” they will escape to, as rats who know how to talk and understand their fate in the company of humans must do.

But the daughter (Emilia Clarke) of the mayor (Hugh Bonneville) of their latest fleeced-town figures out the truth and gets mixed-up in more complicated affairs in the next town, where a King Rat (David Thewlis) runs the food-stealing racket, and is plotting a rat take-over that will displace their human tormentors forever.

This Anglo-German production features clever, stylized and angular Burton/Henry Selick “Nightmare Before Christmas/Coraline/Corpse Bride” character design.

It’s a cute story, with elements of “The Music Man” and visual settings from “Flushed Away.” The action sequences have a Tex Avery-lite energy, and the heavy use of over-sized/in-your-face closeups give the comic moments a lift that’s sorely needed.

But the cleverest thing about it might be teaching children, the primary audience for this animated comedy, the basics of story structure.

Malicia (Clarke), our narrator explains the “framing device” that her narration encompasses, and pauses to define “foreshadowing” in a story — filmed or otherwise — as “a kind of promise to you (the viewer), letting you know that if you keep with the story, it’s going to get ugly!”

Malicia injects herself into the action of this tale, paired-up with the piper Kevin as they try to steal a better instrument from the REAL Pied Piper (Rob Brydon), who isn’t having it.

“If you don’t turn your life into a story,” the ever-dramatic Malicia warns timid Kevin, “You become part of someone ELSE’s story!”

But uh, stories and fairytale adventures being what they are, what’s she see in the future for her and Kevin? Because Kevin wants to know.

“You’re not handsome enough for a ‘love interest,’ and you’re not funny enough for comic relief.”

She’ll have to think about that, in other words.

A bit of history tossed in — rats subjected to “the pit,” where “ratter” terriers were unleashed on them and bets taken on how many rats they could kill in a minute. Recreating that gives one pause, considering the audience, but it also raises the stakes and makes for a fine comical rats-vs-terriers fight sequence.

“The Amazing Maurice” trips along for some of its length, and pauses a bit too much in other places, without quite enough giggles to fill its 93 minutes. It could have used a bit more of self-centered, self-serving Maurice, a cat burning through his nine lives and in need of a conscience to go with his human-like cunning, acquired, after a fashion, exactly the way the rats learned to speak and think — dining on rubbish at a magician’s garbage dump.

But even if it’s not wholly “amazing,” “Maurice” is close enough, a flip and fun film about a rodent conspiracy, rats who “plan” vs” “rats who “dream,” and a cat who corrects everybody’s pronunciation of his name, not the British “Morris,” but “Mau-REESE,” the way God and Steve Miller intended.

Rating: PG, mild toilet humor

Cast: The voices of Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, Himesh Patel, David Tennant, Gemma Arterton, Ariyon Bakare, Rob Brydon, David Thewlis and Hugh Bonneville.

Credits: Directed by Toby Genkel and Florian Westermann, scripted by Terry Rossio, Robert Chandler and Toby Genkel, based on the novel by Terry Pratchett. A Viva Kids release, a Sky Animation film.

Running time: 1:33

He’s a loner, a photographer who runs the photo studio he inherited from his father, a man who almost never speaks, especially to women. His hobby is photographing insects in the parks of this corner of Japan. He even keeps a praying mantis as a pet.

She’s a model, an influencer and a former ballerina, struggling to work out her issues, bodily and financial.

Their “meet cute” is him spying her, a lithe beauty in yoga pants and halter top, entangled in the top of a tree after a fall. A selfie gone wrong?

But something about this odd, outgoing Kyoko makes the misogynist photographer follow her, see to her wounds and even take her in, pretty much without saying a word.

This “Woman of the Photographs” becomes his erotic obsession, and this weird, older photographer earns her interest. Perhaps it’s the way he photographs her injuries, or his deft hand at touching up her photos to hide those deep scratches, which at some point, she decides she can’t bear to allow to heal.

The debut feature of Takeshi Kushida is kinky and polite, obsessive and cringe-worthy and ever-so-Japanese in all these regards.

I didn’t catch Kai (Hideki Nagai) mentioned by name. As he virtually never speaks, and his customers all seem to want the same thing, that’s understandable. He never even mentions his fees.

What the newly-divorced man looking for a portrait-quality photo with his ex-wife erased from it, or the woman (Toki Koinuma) who keeps getting her dating website photo “improved” want is Kai’s master’s touch with the digital airbrush. We watch him “clean up” photos in real time, raising her cheekbones, thinning her waist and the like.

It’s no wonder Kai prefers the unretouched natural world, which is how Kyoko stumbles into his presence.

Whatever we notice about her as she bleeds from cuts, fusses over the selfie that let to the injuries and didn’t come out, and generally carry on both ends of a running conversation, is her beauty. What Kai sees is anybody’s guess, as he cannot stop recoiling any time she touches him.

An old friend of his and his father’s (Toshiaki Inomata, who was in “Drive My Car”) is something of an intermediary. At least he talks to her, fills in details of Kai’s life and explains this retouching business to Kyoko, who avails herself of it for her influencer/brand rep website.

“A good lie can make people happy,” the older man rationalizes. What’s the harm in that?

But Kyoko sees something insidious about this polished “truth,” connecting her obsession with the perfections and imperfections of her body with his meticulous efforts to achieve perfection, if only in an idealized photo.

“We are two of a kind,” she decides. “We can only love ourselves through others.”

Kushida puts this unequal, somewhat unsettling relationship through the wringer as Kyoko’s mania has her picking at her wounds to keep them from healing, and Kai kind of getting off on that.

The relationship is filtered through their separate routines, her “daily Kyoko” photo, which has can turn into a work of art, his trips to the communal bathhouse, his daily “uniform” of white suit, socks and hat.

The filmmaker messes around with sound here, with every sound effect — shoes on cobble-stones, etc. — looped-in. Insect noises sneak into the soundtrack, and the mantis eating sound effect would pass muster in any horror film.

Slight as it is, it’s all a little creepy and occasionally kind of funny, in a dry, dark and oh-my-God-did-she-open-that-wound AGAIN bloody way.

Rating: unrated, disturbing, bloody imagery, nudity

Cast: Hideki Nagai, Itsuki Otaki, Toki Koinuma and Toshiaki Inomata

Credits: Scripted and directed by Takeshi Kushida. A Dread release, through Epic Pictures.

Running time: 1:29

Paul and Vin and Michelle et al, back in the blush of youth, when they were all living and this decades old franchise was fresh.

“Fast X” is coming, and its own trailer is in the works.

A kid who longs to grow up to be a pro surfer rides waves and surfs through the shoals of a seriously dysfunctional home life in “Ocean Boy,” which was titled “Bosch & Rockit” in Australia, where this “true story” really happened.

Tyler Atkins is a model and reality TV star who won Australia’s version of “Amazing Race” and banked that notoriety to make a fictionalized account of growing up inthee water and even on the lam when he was supposed to be in school, thanks to his irresponsible parents.

It’s sentimental, a kind of corny, cliched coming-of-age picture with just enough “ocean” to it to feel exotic, with pretty settings and prettier actors dressing-up an idealized take on a childhood that couldn’t have been any picnic, no matter how much dramatic license he takes with it.

But Luke Hemsworth of “West World” and the down-and-dirty drugs-and-dropouts settings make it worth a look, if not a film to really sink your teeth into.

“Bosch” is a farm lad gone to seed, a single dad with a pot-growing-and-distributing business that pays the bills and keeps the kid in surfboards.

Rockit, played by Rasmus King, is a blond Adonis in his early teens, but a product of such tuned-out parenting that the kids in school bully the pretty boy they call “Dum Dum.”

Mum’s not in the picture, and from Dad’s illegal business, free-spending (vintage Mach I Mustang) and womanizing ways, we can think of a few reasons that’s the case.

The kid’s just looking for any excuse to surf at dawn and cut school.

It all goes sideways when the old-mate/dirty cop Bosch is in business with lets an even dirtier detective (Martin Sacks) in on their operation. His suggestion that they start “making some real money” isn’t a suggestion.

“We’re farmers here, we don’t SELL coke” falls on deaf ears. One ill-timed bush fire later, Bosch sees their whole lives go up in flames, revealing their business to legitimate police, but with a lot of payola and cocaine lost as well. The dirty wants to get to him first.

Bosch grabs some cash and the kid and they go “on holiday.”

They can’t give their real names, can’t use credit cards and can’t make plans past camping on a far-off beach, or moving into a “surfer motel.” Not that this slows Bosch’s roll when the fetching Bev (Isabel Lucas) crosses his field of view.

Atkins and his co-writer Drue Metz do a decent job of making the “like father/like son” stuff funny and sometimes unsettling. Rockit curses just just like dad and picks up a blunt because “YOU do it.” He buys Dad’s “My real job” whopper, and blithely swipes enough cash to buy a new surfboard.

When your father’s so unconcerned for your well-being that he can’t be bothered to feed you or alter his “get a date” impulses to buy groceries, the kid learns to put himself first and last, just like the old man.

The period piece milieu — it wasn’t THAT long ago — feels lived-in and credible. Maybe you could lay low like this in pre-Internet Oz. And I always get a kick out of any fresh serving of Aussie slang, “Blow ins” being tourists, “grommet” a small kid, and so on.

Hemsworth makes a fine, burly presence at the heart of this, and we see much of their life and his travails from his point of view. The messaging, about how loving your kid isn’t enough to make you a good parent, goes down easy the way Hemsworth plays it. He’s a lout, and lovable at it.

But the comic bits are strained,. A clumsily-handled introduction of young love (Savannah La Rain) and the third act arrival of ever-absent Mum (Leanna Walsman) have to fit in between less and less frequent updates on the manhunt underway for Bosch.

“Ocean Boy” is awkward and ungainly — as if made by someone determined to hit his life’s real-or-fictional waypoints, to gloss up his own image while playing up the obstacles he had to overcome, but incapable of managing any of that particularly gracefully.

Rating: unrated, drug abuse, violence, profanity

Cast: Luke Hemsworth, Rasmus King, Isabel Lucas, Leanna Walsman and Martin Sacks.

Credits: Directed by Tyler Atkins, scripted by Tyler Atkins and Drue Metz. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:46

“Infinity Pool” is a violent, hallucinatory thriller that puts the viewer, like its protagonist, in a pretty ugly head space. It’s unpleasant, gory and occasionally troubling, so of course Mia Goth co-stars in it. That’s become her brand.

It wallows in the impossible and skirts past it hoping we don’t notice. It’s demanding and disturbing in that “Eyes Wide Shut” way, a swipe at the class divide about a creative-type who must murder his ego by relentlessly, repeatedly surrendering to his Id.

But for a movie with “Pool” in the title, for a film by a Canadian nepo baby named Cronenberg, it invites the easy put-down “shallow.” Every strobing blur of Brandon-son-of-David Cronenberg’s edits and best efforts never quite obscure that the end doesn’t justify the gory, indulgent psychosis of the means.

Alexander Skarsgård, an actor who never shies away from risky, gimmicky fare, plays James Foster, a writer with one book behind him and nothing promising on the horizon. So naturally, a get-away to an exclusive resort in a fictional, backward and poor Adriatic state (it was filmed in Croatia) is his idea of searching for “inspiration.”

Then again, that’s probably his wife’s suggestion. Em (Cleopatra Colman) is lovely, loving and to the manner born. The first couple they meet for dinner at this Pa QLQA resort includes a British “fan” (Goth) of James’ book, and her nosy, much-older Swiss husband (Jalil Lespert). He’s tactlessly rich enough to ask how they get by, with one little known novel on the balance sheet.

“He married money,” Em jokes, going on to overshare the “daddy issues” that contributed to her keeping James in comfort.

In classic “trap” thriller fashion, their new “friends” lure them into “breaking the rules,” leaving resort property in a dangerous and and backward ex-Eastern Bloc state. One convertible drive up the coast –1970 vintage American land-yacht Cadillacs, Pontiacs and Chevys are the local status symbol — a dip in the water, a beachside cookout and a lot of drinking later, and James runs over a local on the drive back to the hotel.

It doesn’t matter that the car’s electrical system went out, right on queue, that James was suspiciously easy to lure into driving or that their new “friends” insist they not call the cops or help the dying man lying in the road. We may wonder “Set up?” James, and the movie never do.

Thus begins his plunge into La Tolqa’s version of Hell — arrest, coerced by the stern cop (Thomas Kretschmann) into confessing, and offered an “out.”

This backward, half-ruined half-failed state has a means of cloning, a magical immersion in red and blue goo that produces another James that the locals can have their “blood for blood” revenge upon in a ritualized execution to be carried out by someone from the victim’s family.

There’s an ATM at the seedy police station so that you can cover the cost. All James, Em, Gabby (Goth) and Albin (Lespert) have to do is be there to witness this “version” of James — whom Det. Tresh lets slip might “have your memories,” too — stabbed to death.

And that isn’t the end of it. It’s merely the beginning, as James finds himself goaded into drinking binges with Gabby and Albin’s circle of ex-pats, the idle rich given to murderous pranks against the local “animals” of this “not civilized” state, their every misdeed easily rectified by another visit to the ATM and another “doubling.”

With his third film, after “Possessor” and “Antiviral,” Young Cronenberg firmly establishes himself in the family business, movies of a perverse and unsettling mind-and-body-under-threat and violated by science and society that was his father’s pre-“History of Violence” calling card.

The shocks — drunken montages of murderous and carnal abandon, gooey, intertwined and ugly — are entirely the point. Whether they make sense, illuminate the human condition or “entertain” is almost immaterial.

Goth adds a British accent to her deranged repertoire, and is as convincing as this entitled, consequence-free dominatrix as she was as a Texas teen tart ready for porn, and payback, in “X” and “Pearl.” There’s no getting around that she’s good, no escaping the reputation she’s acquired as “uninhibited.”

Others may find her psychotic, nude and take-charge sexual turns titillating. She’s yet to play a character who didn’t make me cringe, which is saying something. Her best moment here is demonstrating Gabby’s line of work, a TV commercial actress/model whose specialty is “failing naturally.” She’s great at pretending she can’t do the simplest daily activities without the aid of whatever new household gadget she’s pitching.

Cronenberg so perfectly mimics his father’s cerebral horror shtick that he jumps right into the obscure cul de sacs that some of David Cronenberg’s films wandered into, which I had similar reactions to.

Brandon Cronenberg is like a painter handed the building blocks of the film form — the blood, urine, semen, psychosis and adventurous-minded movie stars — but who leaps strait into impressionism without mastering the storytelling basics.

The shocks of “Infinity Pool” feel unearned, the ordeal of the experience unrewarding and the themes — here’s that pun again — shallow.

Rating: R, graphic violence, explicit sex, alcohol abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alexander Skarsgård, Mia Goth, Cleopatra Colman, Thomas Kretschmann, Jalil Lespert and John Ralston.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandon Cronenberg. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:57

What does M. Night Shyamalan’s adaptation “Knock at the Cabin” have in common with “Old,” “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening?” It’s glib, gloomy, and in the end, kind of pointless.

Even its “apocalyptic” edge seems played, a road to nowhere that takes 100 minutes to travel. It’s slick and sleek. But a filmmaker who started his career with “The Next Spielberg” hype but whose “surprise twist” thrillers revealed “The Next Hitchcock” to be Shyamalan’s real goal, seems to sort of flounder about on the screen, these days.

The twists became too obvious and the misses started outnumbering the hits, the Hitch and Spielberg comparisons faded as he focused on world building and horror “parables.” While he’s made a popular and successful pivot to TV (“Servant,” “Wayward Pines”), his movies just grow curiouser and curiouser, and ever more disappointing.

A gay couple, played by Jonathan Groff (“Hamilton,” TV’s “Mindhunters”) and Ben Aldridge (“Fleabag,” “Pennyworth”) and their adopted little girl (Kristen Chui) drive off to a rental cabin in the Pennsylvania woods for the weekend.

A stranger, played by tattooed man mountain Dave Bautista, walks out of the woods and strikes up a conversation with the child, gently brushing past her “I don’t talk to strangers.”

“I’m here to be your friend.”

As other “friends” appear in the woods (Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn and Rupert Grint), “Leonard” tells Wen to inform her parents that he needs to talk them, and she flees.

A rising panic and shouted threats from inside the cabin merely delay the inevitable, which, as you’ve seen from the film’s trailers, climaxes with the folks from outside coming inside, armed with homemade cudgels, axes and the like, and making an announcement.

They are “normal people, just like you,” Leonard insists. But they have “the most important job in the history of the world.”

They’re here to persuade this modern family to choose among themselves which family member to “sacrifice” or “the world will end.”

The longer they take to decide, the more disasters — earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. — will befall a humanity that needs to be “punished.” If they don’t decide to act out “Sophie’s Choice,” humanity will end and they’ll be there to witness it.

Because even in the woods, they have cable. Not phone service, because that would be inconvenient to the plot. Just TV news “proof” that what these four strangers are foretelling will come to pass.

So what we’ve got here is a thought experiment/Old Testament morality play straight out of the Theatre of the Absurd.

There will be doubts sewn and perhaps dispelled, scheming to escape this fate and tragedies both huge and impersonal (via TV) and gruesomely close at hand.

And the whole time, through all the violence meant to shock and the acting meant to touch us, we’re wondering what sensitive Daddy Eric (Goffman), and tough and rational Daddy Andrew (Aldridge) wonder.

“Why?” “Punished” for what, exactly?

Habitat destruction, climate collapse, Nazi revivalism, general Godlessness, voting for the anti Christ…twice? Tik Tok?

Maybe as the gays wonder, it’s all about gay marriage.

Flashbacks give us pieces of their “story,” and the four visitors tell us, each in turn, their “stories” like every AA meeting, every “Chorus Line” pre-audition interview you’ve ever seen on screen.

This adaptation of Paul Tremblay’s novel gets a pass in this “why” question, as that’s a Theatre of the Absurd convention, fumbling in the darkness, “Six Characters in Search of an Author” or just a couple of clowns “Waiting for Godot.” There aren’t always answers.

But while Shyamalan does well by the story’s assorted jolts, and tries to have fun with a bit of casting against type with Bautista and Grint, “Knock” is so emotionally flat that I found it impossible to care about. For a film in which the stakes couldn’t be higher, that’s a fatal failing.

And without answers or any sort of soul wrenching pathos and sense of loss that isn’t undercut by a cheap musical joke at the end, one really does wonder if this ever had a point. Because it could use one.

Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Dave Bautista, Jonathan Groff, Kristen Cui, Ben Aldridge, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abby Quinn and Rupert Grint.

Credits: Directed by M. Night Shyamalan, scripted by M. Night Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Mi, based on the novel by Paul Tremblay. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:40

“Godland” is an Icelandic fable of faith and cultures clashing and colonialism told as the story of a Danish Lutheran priest sorely tested when he’s sent to minister to an unserved corner of the sparsely populated volcanic rock.

Hlynur Pálmason, who directed the modern drama “A White, White Day,” gives us a starkly beautiful 19th century period piece with this film, showcasing Iceland in all its rainy, treeless but still green summery glory.

The back story, related in an opening title, tells of a box of glass wet-plate photographs from the 1800s, taken by a priest and found in Iceland. Pálmason took those seven images (never shown) and conjured up a dark and unsettling fish-out-of-water story about such a priest, a young man (Elliott Crosset Hove) urged to “adapt to the circumstances of the land and its people” by his bishop before departing Denmark.

He’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. He’s got a translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) with him. No worries.

The film’s lone joke suggests otherwise. We hear that translator feeding word after Icelandic word to Father Lucas on the topsail schooner voyage to Iceland. Lucas repeats them, patiently, one after the other. And then he pauses.

“All those words mean rain?”

This may be tougher than he thought. Maybe they’ll all speak Danish!

Just how much of a problem is obvious shortly after they row ashore for their long packhorse trek across the island. Not knowing Icelandic means Lucas doesn’t understand that grizzled trek leader Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson) just called him a “Danish devil,” and his cargo — crates of books and a wrapped up oversized cross — “damned nonsense.” But thanks to subtitles, we do.

Their quest becomes an ordeal, one made more arduous by the constant “I don’t understand what you’re saying” each man passive-aggressively snaps at the other.

We start to wonder just how wide that language gap is, and if one man or both of them are feigning they that they speak less of the other’s tongue than they do, just to irk or ignore the other.

Thank goodness Lucas has his translator. One river crossing later, he doesn’t.

It’s only after Lucas wakes up, nearly broken by the journey and delivered unconscious to the settlement where they’re to build a church that we learn that this trek that almost did him in and cost another man his life was unnecessary. He was put ashore there because “I wanted to see the land and its people,” he says, and “photograph them.”

Their arrival amongst other folks doesn’t mean the Ragnar tests are over. And the widowed sheep and horse farmer (Jacob Lohmann) who takes him in has other complications, two daughters, one of them (Vic Carmen Sonne) old enough to catch the fragile, despairing priest’s eye. At least they all speak Danish.

“Godland” is a somewhat drawn-out tale told with patience and an eye for what makes Iceland magical. Stunning waterfalls, rolling green mountainsides, swampy tundra, an adorable Icelandic dog and an erupting volcano whose gases “can make men mad,” the bishop warned, all catch our eye, and that of the priest, who breaks out his ungainly camera to try and memorialize people he meets.

The premise had me thinking of Romulus Linney’s novel-turned-play “Heathen Valley,” about a “Christian” valley in remote Appalachia that’s turned pagan or the great Canadian film “Black Robe,” about Jesuits among the First Nations in the 17th century. But these Icelanders aren’t primitive. They’re not all tithing church folk, but some are.

All they need is a new chapel and a priest to minister to them. But a joyful wedding in the unfinished church isn’t officiated by Lucas, who won’t agree to such duties until the church is finished. And his sometime tormentor Ragnar may ask for spiritual guidance. That doesn’t mean this prickly, homesick priest will provide it.

We see two cultures represented, with Iceland somewhat tolerant of “Danish devils,” but with the highhanded Dane not reading the room and ignoring his “adapt to the circumstances” edict from his bishop.

Faith isn’t enough to guide this priest, and “God” doesn’t figure in how the locals deal with this stranger. The hostility is mostly beneath the surface, the moral superiority of colonialism implicit, the practical ineptitude of the Danish devil extending from his lack of skill with a horse to his clumsy courtship of young Anna, and the fact that he barely tolerates the most adorable dog on the island.

A two and a half hour Icelandic parable isn’t going to be to every taste. But Pálmason, framing his movie in old still photograph 1.33.1 aspect ratio, immerses us in a place and a time — beautiful, unspoiled and eternal. And he makes us question, as Lucas, Ragnar and others do, the function of faith in such circumstances, and the usefulness of those who insist on proselytizing without listening.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Elliott Crosset Hove, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Vic Carmen Sonne, Hilmar Guðjónsson, Jacob Lohmann and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir

Credits: Scripted and directed by Hlynur Pálmason. A Janus Films release.

Running time: 2:22

“The Lost Lotteries” is a seriously slap-shticky farce from Thailand, another version of “We need to get back that LOTTO ticket,” this one co-starring a famous Thai kickboxer.

It’s not all that original, but it’s as screwy as can be, and has a nice Around the World with Netflix taste of Thai life.

Lottery tickets sold by independent ticket sellers, as they are in Spain and other parts of Europe, cockfighting, mafia-run underworld boxing, loan sharks — it’s a world of the very rich and everybody else hustling just to get by. A simple rooftop “dream” moment captures the class divide in Bangkok — shacks mixed with modern tony high-rises of the affluent.

Our teen hero (Wongravee Nateeton) is finishing up high school, dreaming of girls and playing chess, when the lottery ticket-selling tray his mother passed along to him is stolen by gangsters trying to collect Mom’s latest debt.

When the winning numbers are announced, four regular customers come up to collect. All young Tay can do is convince convention model/saleswoman Zoe (Napapa Tantrakul), hotheaded actor Wen (Padung Songsang), cute Beat (Phantira Pipityakorn) and Khung, a failed boxer with bad hair and a big mole that keep him from being a dead ringer for famous Thai kickboxer Somjit Jongjohor to help him recover that tray.

Khung is played by Somjit Jongjohor, so yeah, the movie’s kind of like that.

The “ridiculous and improbable plan” Tay and the others conceive involves breaking into the mob’s fireworks factory, home to after hours cockfights and “no rules” cage fight boxing matches. They will create a series distractions, steal keys and recover the lottery tickets.

Yes, our failed fighter must channel Somjit Jongjohor in the cage long enough for the plan to come together. Maybe this drug-juiced lip balm will help.

Writer-director Prueksa Amaruji keeps this daffy, and just dark enough to have stakes. Because we know that “made man” of the mob Mee (Torpung Kulong) is a dangerous character to cross. And he’s not even Mr. Big.

The picture’s poor pacing spoils some of the fun and there’s a tedious over-reliance on voice-over narration (in Thai with subtitles, or dubbed into English. But Amaruji, who did the “Bikeman” farces, knows his way around a sight gag.

And who would have guessed a Thai fighter could be this good at physical comedy?

“The Lost Lotteries” is never more than a mixed bag, but Jongjohor and Songsang’s mugging lets it punch its way out of that bag every now and then.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Wongravee Nateeton, Napapa Tantrakul, Padung Songsang, Torpung Kulong, Phantira Pipityakorn and Somjit Jongjohor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Prueksa Amaruji. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48