Movie Nation

“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

It’s an iconic set up, a “Show us what you’ve got” moment common to a whole lot of movies about “wheelmen,” the guys who drive the getaway car.

The hoods have shown up in a little old lady Mercedes, an orange 1970 280 S. They flinch at the getaway driver’s asking price.

“How do we know you’re that good?”

“The Driver” barely gives the orange import a second glance and snaps “Get in.”

The “audition” comes after we’ve seen “The Driver,” played by Ryan O’Neal, run a string of police cruisers into walls in an opening chase. Plainly, the would-be robbers missed that. So he proceeds to terrorize them by dismantling that Merc, bumper by bumper, door-by-snapped-off-door, deftly screeching down the lanes of a parking garage, popping the stems off fire hose valves on each pillar as he power slides, drifts and rams walls for their benefit.

It’s a representative of the genre now, but writer-director Walter Hill’s minimalist jewel wasn’t appreciated by critics or audiences when it came out. Over forty years later, we can see it for the Urtext that it was. O’Neal’s tightlipped, unflappable wheelman inspired “Transporter” movies, a whole Clive Owen ad campaign (“The Hire”) featuring famous filmmakers, Ryan Gosling’s “Drive,” “Wheelman,” “Baby Driver” and a few Quentin Tarantino movies and car movie moments to boot.

Nobody has a name, everybody’s a “type” or archetype. There’s The Driver (O’Neal), the Detective (Bruce Dern, funny and hateful) hunting the handsome, country-music loving wheel he nicknames “Cowboy,” the Fed’s combative underling (Matt Clark), The Connection (a “go between” played by Ronee Blakley, a Robert Altman favorite), The Player, aka an alibi and woman of mystery played by Isabelle Adjani, and assorted mugs, thugs and trigger men who find themselves in need of our anti-hero, who could have coined the phrase, “Drive it like you stole it.”

This isn’t “Bullitt,” with its signature race through Greater San Francisco. It’s not as deft and delicate as the spectacular Euro car getaways of the films of Luc Besson & others — “Transporter” or “Ronin” — often stunt-directed by Rémy Julienne.

No, these are overpowered Yank Tanks from Detroit’s Golden Age of Gas Waste and Planned Obsolescence. LTDs etc. stolen (all you needed was a screwdriver) and put through heedless abuse of automatic transmissions, worm-gear steering, drum brakes and leaf spring suspensions as he ignores LA red lights and barrels down every downtown street, alley or parking garage. Stunt coordinator Everett Creach and a dozen drivers put anything Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham did with “Smoke and the Bandit” Trans Ams (and a Firebird here) to shame.

O’Neal, a light comedian and pretty boy romantic lead, was never as cool or as tough as he is here, a man of mad skills and few words.

His performance and this film became the model of how these guys are portrayed on the screen — quiet, focused, mistrusting and mysterious professionals.

The plot is paper thin, the action explosive — double crosses and set ups, chases and shoot outs. A favorite moment, our Driver gets the drop on a double-crosser by shooting him through the rolled up car window of the open door he’s standing behind.

He stole it. He’s not worried about replacing the glass, and Hill’s not going to need a retake.

Hill, fresh off his first sleeper hit, “Hard Times,” backed by two future heavyweight producers (Lawrence Gordon of LARGO, Frank Marshall of Team Spielberg), could weather a film that didn’t draw crowds and didn’t have the sort of enthusiastic reviews of his even brawnier “Hard Times.” He would go from this to make “The Warriors,” a cult film that has grown in stature and is pretty much considered the quintessential Walter Hill Film — tough guys, tougher broads and two-fisted action.

But “The Driver” has also grown in stature. Hill was never more bankable than when he leaped from “The Warriors” and “Long Riders” and peaked with the blockbuster action buddy comedy “48 Hrs.” Hill’s lean, archetypal style, translated to Vietnam allegories (“Southern Comfort”) and Westerns or crime pictures (“Johnny Handsome”), became something everybody growing up watching those films wanted to copy when they got to make their own movies.

From Tarantino to Besson to Nicolas Winding Refn, Hollywood to Hong Kong, Seoul to the South of France, when the underworld needs to get someplace, they’re calling a version of “The Driver,” someone they don’t dare ask the wrong question.

“How do we know you’re that good?

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Dern, Matt Clark, Felice Orlandi and Ronee Blakley

Credits: Scripted and directed by Walter Hill.

Running time: 1:30

Don’t want to get too carried away about how much this new Brit zombie movie “Alive” sucks, but the “doctor” in a painfully amateurish opening scene gives “bad news” by putting on and taking off his glasses half a dozen times in just under a minute of screen time.

A fire scene early in the viral zombie apocalypse is staged in what is plainly a fire department’s narrow high rise training tower.

Every new sequence its own dose of “What fresh hell is this?”

“Alive” is a sloppy mashup of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Every Zombie Movie Ever Made.

The virus hits a culture that seems resigned to it, I have to say. Keep Calm and Give Up, apparently. Even those fleeing seem dispirited.

The brain-eaters have the good sense to be able to dodge gunfire and the good grace to make that generic monster clicking/gurgling noise common to everything from “Predator” movies to “Jurassic Park” installments.

Makes it harder for them to sneak up on you, you see.

Our writer-director, David Marantz, clumsily establishes multiple characters to follow — a little boy (Daniel May-Gohrey, his 15 year-old sister (Ellen Hillman) and her boyfriend (Kian Pritchard), an armed, crazed “End is Nigh” preacher (Stuart Matthews) and his “Huh, he finally got THAT right” flock, and a lone hunter (Neil Sheffield) holed-up in a cottage in the woods.

I suppose the zombies who stumble into the hunter but refuse to chase him across a creek are meant to reinforce the notion of an “island off the south coast” where these Brits can hide out and hold out and restart civilization. Zombies afraid of water, and all that.

Of course, the island, promoted on desperate radio broadcasts, has a catch attached. They’re really interested in “women (and girls) capable of bearing children.”

The picture puts these disparate groups on the road, and then stops undead in its tracks when the production got hold of what looks like an old school for a location. The bulk of the film is show there, where the action is limited and the kids try to fend off the cult with the help of the hunter and they’re all wondering if they have enough ammo to keep the walking dead at bay.

The acting ranges from poor to middling, with the direction and editing making everybody in it look new to this whole “movie” thing. Cuts begin before the take’s action kicks in, and pause afterwards for a long beat or two before the next shot is edited in.

Amateurish.

It’s a bad zombie movie that staggers to a halt and turns worse.

Rating: PG-13, violence

Cast: Ellen Hillman, Kian Pritchard, Neil Sheffield, Gillian Broderick, Daniel May-Gohrey and Stuart Matthews.

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Marantz. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:32

Not every actor in his position, once more famous than he is now and a long time between hit films or must-see series, gets the parts that Ryan Phillippe does.

Even the B-movies have possibilities, and if not high-mindedness, at least the nobility of being sturdy installments in time-honored genres. Phillippe seems to get that, and rarely disappoints in such outings, no matter how malnourished some of them seem.

As “The Locksmith” he’s a career criminal whose partner is murdered on a safecracking job by the dirty cop who set it up. The film is about how this bad-man-who-was-wronged carries himself and what he gets mixed-up in when he gets out ten years later.

There are lapses in logic that far-too-often let it down. But with a good cast and an eminently hissable villain (Jeff Nordling), it gets the job done, and Phillippe has another solid, value-added turn on his resume.

He plays Miller Graham, a small-time crook in a small city in the desert southwest. We meet him just as that burglary arranged by Det. Zwick (Nordling) goes south and Zwick covers his ass by killing Graham’s partner.

There’re no on-the-scene heroics as this goes down. Graham has a wife and baby girl. His partner had a kid sister. There’s nothing for it but to keep his mouth shut, take the arrest and do his time.

Ten years later, he tries to reconcile with his ex (Kate Bosworth) and get to know his kid (Madeleine Guilbot). His old partner and mentor Frank (Ving Rhames) gives him “handy man” work as a locksmith’s assistant, so “staying clean” is within reach.

The dirty cop may be retiring, but his makes sure his corrupt unit roughs Graham up for old time’s sake. And the sister (Gabriela Quezada) of Grahams late partner-in-crime has grown up to have problems of her own, and demands his help.

His past won’t let him go.

Some actions our hero takes seem illogical, and some situations have him as the last guy in the room who gets a clue about what’s really going on.

When a bad guy says “Kill ANYbody!” to a subordinate, we logically expect that to be carried out, not leaving this or that loose end to fend for himself or herself and plot the criminals’ undoing.

But Nordling makes a terrific heavy, Rhames oozes credibility as the wizened small-time crook turned small business owner, Bosworth holds her own and Phillippe hits just the right notes — crooked to the core, wary of everybody except for “family,” naive enough to think his instincts are enough.

“The Locksmith’s” not bad, unless you’re inclined to — you know — pick at it.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Ryan Phillippe, Kate Bosworth, Ving Rhames, Jeff Nordling, Gabriela Quezada, Madeleine Guilbot, Charlie Webber and Tom Wright.

Credits: Nicolas Harvard, scripted by John Glosser and Ben Kabialis. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:32

Lily Collins plays a wealthy, powerful family’s daughter who learns about their skeleton in the attic — actually hidden in a bunker in the woods of the family estate — in “Inheritance,” a lumbering thriller from the director of the Margot Robbie bomb titled “Terminal.”

Putting the ballerina-dainty Collins in any movie where physical throw-weight matters is always problematic. Here, she’s a Manhattan district attorney facing down corrupt billionaires and their high-priced lawyers in court by day, a manic daughter trying to keep the upper hand on a bigger, more motivated hermit her father enslaved in an underground lair decades before.

Put aside any issues with the film’s pacing, the public servant’s reluctance to do what seems like the obvious “right” and “legal” thing, and it’s just hard to buy Collins in many situations this movie puts her in. She’s easy to underestimate, to perceive as a lightweight, figuratively and literally.

It all comes to pieces for Lauren Monroe when her stern, high-expectations banker/father (Patrick Warburton) dies in the middle of her biggest case.

Daddy shafting her in the will, favoring her embattled Congressman younger brother (Chace Crawford), assorted charities and her mother (Connie Nielsen), doesn’t help.

But Daddy left Lauren a flash drive and a key. He won’t tell her, on his video message from the grave, his “secret.” But the key, and the location of the lock it fits will. It’s the source of “a secret you must carry to your grave.”

That’s where the bearded, soiled and miserable hostage who eventually tells her his name is “Morgan” is kept. Played by a barely-recognizable (FLAWless accent, mate!) Simon Pegg, this reluctant hermit locked away where even sunlight can’t find him has a tale to tell. And he takes his sweet time telling it.

Lauren, even with pressures closing in around her (court, media attention, her in-the-dark husband played by Marque Richardson and their little girl), can’t let herself panic or even feel any urgency about getting to the bottom of this crime and scandal-above-all-scandals.

Morgan? He’s desperate but apparently patient, a man who has held on, clinging to a memorized recipe for key lime pie, making petty demands when he realizes she’s not going to let him go on sight.

“My survival would be my revenge” on her father, he tells her.

Director Vaughn Stein takes forever to get this movie on its feet, and the slower he goes, the more Collins stands out as inadequate as his lead. We need to have lots of doubts about her actions and motivations, sense an inner resolve and toughness, see her doing the instant calculus of what she’s confronted with.

A faster-paced film might have given us at least the illusion of those, papered over with the urgency of “This will all blow up in my face any second now” that we never, ever feel in a movie about a situation that should throw our heroine into a rash, blind panic.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Lily Collins, Simon Pegg, Connie Nielsen, Michael Beach, Chace Crawford, Marque Richardson and Patrick Warburton

Credits: Directed by Vaughn Stein, scripted by Matthew Kennedy. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:51

“Mixtape” is a word loaded with meaning to generations, a form of musical shorthand with one person curating a collection of songs to express their feelings for someone else, to make a statement about who they are through their musical tastes, or just provide appropriate jams to accompany a road trip.

So titling your documentary “Mixtape Trilogy” builds in certain expectations.

But the film Kathleen Ermitage presents under that label, “Mixtape Trilogy: Stories of the Power of Music” has literally nothing to do with such expectations. It’s a tuneful three musicians/three “fans” film groping around for a theme, with a title that seems an overreach as well.

There’s a somewhat touching opening story of how Indigo Girls fanatic Dylan Yellowlees — who has attended over 350 of their shows over the decades — found comfort, identity and her “tribe” when she caught their first hit, “Closer to Fine” on the radio.

Neither the “Girls” — Amy Ray and Emily Saliers — nor Yellowlees had come out in the late ’80s when they first hit and Yellowlees discovered her favorite band. But a life-bond was made, and they’ve actually gotten to know each other over the years. Remembering how closeted most of gay America was at that time, Yellowlees paints an interesting picture of that first Indigo Girls concert, where “I wasn’t the only lesbian” in the room, for the first time in perhaps her life.

Garnette Cardogan is a Charlottesville essayist and academic, a native of Jamaica and jazz fan who lived in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina sent him to New York, where he found Indian-American jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, and they bonded over Iyer’s “political” techno-tinged tunes.

And Michael Ford is a Detroit native with a design school background who bills himself as “The Hip Hop Architect,” someone who dissects and deconstructs tunes by the likes of Talib Kweli, and uses that to inspire designs and urban planning and teaches kids to analyze musical messaging and structure via his Hop Hop Architecture Camps.

The three “stories” here don’t really connect. The music is good, but the stories are so different, with each falling on different spots on the “Is there a point to all this?” spectrum that ,the film doesn’t measure up to the tunes.

And damned if I can figure this hip architecture thing that finishes it, other than to guess SOMEbody must be quite good at grant writing to turn a notion that vague and nebulous into a kids’ camp.

Honestly, that goes for the filmmaker as well. Breaking down this “Mixtape” all I can see and hear is three indifferent short films formatted to fit together, but not really making a point.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Amy Ray, Emily Saliers, Dylan Yellowlees, Vijay Iyer, Garnette Cardogan, Michael Ford and Talib Kweli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kathleen Ermitage. A 1091 release

Running time: 1:34

“Little Dixie,” a down and dirty B-movie set in Republican Oklahoma and drug cartel Mexico, makes what I’d consider its first false move over 80 minutes in to its 105 minute running time.

That, as aficionados of B-movies know, ain’t bad.

The latest thriller from the Oklahoma filmmaker John Swab, who gave us the gritty “Ida Red,” is a tense and topical homage to Sam Peckinpah built around Swab’s preferred acting avatar, Frank Grillo. And if you’ve read any reviews on this site over the years, you know I’m all about Frank.

They’ve conjured up a formulaic tale with no heroes, with even the characters we might empathize with less than six degrees separated from bribes, drug smuggling and murders. Swab, who also had the brass to do a truck stop sex trade drama, “Candy Land,” takes formula tropes and wrings something darker if not entirely fresh out of genre. The result goes down like mid-grade whisky — a little rough, a tad predictable, but with a damned satisfying finish.

A conservative, “tough on crime” governor (Eric Dane) gained power thanks to his savvy campaign advisor (Annabeth Gish, bringing a nice intensity) and a strategy that won him not only the state’s deep red Southeast (Little Dixie, but not the “Little Dixie” of the title), but Hispanic voters.

He’s in hot water over “Keystone” pipeline bribes, so he personally shows up at the gruesome execution of a top underboss of the Prado family cartel. That’ll change the subject.

But “Doc,” a comrade from Governor Jeffs’ “special forces” days, is there, too. Doc (Grillo) is wired into all sorts of things. He’s an underground operator/fixer who arranged cash infusions into Jeffs’ campaign. And that cash, we quickly learn, came from that very same cartel.

And “they’re gonna respond.” A governor who figures he’s got a political issue that will get him to Washington and boasts “This is only the beginning,” has no clue, despite Doc’s blunt and bluff warnings.

The Prados send their scariest brother north to deliver their revenge. Raiding a drug lab won’t help. This guy, Cuco (Beau Knapp) wears his sunglasses indoors and his sunglasses at night. And we all know what that means.

Let the reprisals begin. Doc isn’t implicated, but if there’s a general “cleaning” going on, we can guess he’ll be caught up in it. And the fact that we meet Doc’s daughter (Sofia Bryant) gives us at least one person we can root for in all this.

Because everybody else is dirty, venal, and not shy about spilling blood. Doc, like Cuco, has to mow down a lot of cops to escape that police raid.

There are standard ingredients to thrillers like this that genre filmmakers should seriously consider retiring. The daughter as “hostage” thing has been beaten to death. Naked women making drugs has become the new “strip club” in underworld thrillers, a pointless titillation that has become a self-perpetuating movie myth.

And this must be the fiftieth movie I’ve seen in the past six months to have some dude with “special skills” because he’s “ex-special forces.” It’s a crutch. There isn’t even any novelty to making this character a bad “good” man. He’s a cop killer in bed with drug dealers. I bet even a few of the vets who tried to stage a coup one recent January 6 could claim they are “great dads.”

Enough with this crap. It’s worn out, it’s not exactly a “tribute” and movie heroes who aren’t trained killers but find themselves in over-their-heads and forced into violence are always more interesting characters.

That said, Grillo wears this role like the tailored suit jacket he keeps putting on and taking off. Doc doesn’t flip out when he’s forced into action. He knows what weapons and accessories he’s going to need. He acquires them and uses them without compunction.

“Little Dixie” doesn’t break any new ground. Its violence isn’t Sam Peckinpah fresh, partly because the action cinema’s ability to shock has faded due to numbing over-exposure. Several third act twists didn’t play for me, and I thought the finale tried something out that just didn’t work.

But it’s another solid, richly-textured outing by a filmmaker who covers familiar ground and keeps the Oklahoma in his stories and Frank Grillo center-screen when the chips are down.

Rating: R for strong violence and bloody images, pervasive language, some sexual content and brief nudity.

Cast: Frank Grillo, Annabeth Gish, Eric Dane, Sofia Bryant and Beau Knapp

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Swab. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:45

“Petit Mal” is the ever-so-precious title of a minor Spanish melodrama about three twentysomething women who try a “throuple,” a lesbian menage a trois, on for size.

Director, writer and co-star Ruth Caudeli has crafted an intimate, quiet, self-consciously arty and petit prétentieux/petit terne (dull) film about what happens when that peaceful, work-in-progress relationship is tested by a long separation.

Marti, short for Martina (Silvia Varón), Anto (Ana María Otálora) and Laia (Caudeli) share a house, a pack of five dogs and their lives together in a kind of “unequal” romantic/domestic relationship.

They may lightly tease about which two aren’t allowed to speak Catalan instead of Castilian Spanish in front of the other and who “always burns the vegetables” when they’re cooking paella. But they eat off the same paella pan and seem to love and support one another in an almost conventionally unconventional way.

And when Laia talks about how penguins “mate for life,” we are allowed to guess where the fissures will open, because plainly she is the glue that holds the trio together.

Laia has some undefined job in film production which calls her to LA. Is she supporting them? Marti is editing a documentary about their lives together. And emotional Anto is a musician who sits at the piano at one weepy point and composes a lament, “One of three, and I’m alooooone” (in Spanish with English subtitles).

Laia’s leaving leads to tearful “Miss you” Facetime and creates quite the strain at home, where Marti and Anto apparently never would have gotten together were it not for Laia’s butch dyed-blonde allure. Something has to give. What will it be?

Caudeli doesn’t give us a movie of shouting matches, but of subtle, almost silent longing and loneliness. The women back in Spain take some time to get into sync, and find that one thing they might bond over is mutual suspicions of what that female tomcat Laia is up to it LA.

Even that isn’t debated out loud.

Caudeli leaves out back story altogether and takes a very long time to identify every character by name, which is naturalistic (most intimates don’t feel the need to call those their lover anything other than “Amor.” The writer-director never quite reveals exactly how these three keep home and hearth together, although we see one person stuck doing the dishes, another trusted with most of the cooking.

Instead of “how does this work” logistics, Caudeli lets us figure that out without all the information we need. We just observe.

She does that irritating, self-conscious filmmaker thing of serving up this scanty story in titled “chapters,” including “2: We convulsed.” That’s what “Petit Mal” means, a “tiny seizure.” Here, that’s the shock of separation and what it produces.

Every shot, including the right-on-cue sex scene, is beautifully-composed, with the middle acts filmed in black and white to show the color that’s drained out of the relationship that Laia appears to have masterminded.

It’s not a badly-crafted film, just a shallow gloss on these characters and a relationship that they don’t explain, don’t dissect and analyze, but simply live.

That’s not enough.

Rating: unrated, sex and nudity

Cast: Silvia Varón, Ana María Otálora, and Ruth Caudeli

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ruth Caudeli. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:29

One can abide many things from a screen comedy, but “pointlessness” is a real hard sell for me.

That’s a major gripe about the Italian farce “The Price of Family,” titled “Natale a tutti i costi” in the mother tongue.

A movie filled with characters irritating enough to get under your skin, with almost no one likable enough to root for or empathize with, it ruins even that “hate watching” quality by the time the credits roll. In the end, it’s just a dull, mirth-starved muddle that barely gets up on its feet long enough to fall flat.

It’s about bratty, self-absorbed adult kids and their needy, annoying empty-nest parents.

We meet Alessandra (Dharma Mangia Woods) and Emilio (Claudio Colica) on the day they’re leaving home. Both are moving from suburbia to “the city,” out of college and ready to strike out on their own. But at least they’ll come home for holidays, birthdays, funerals and the like, right? Family is everything in Italy, after all.

Nothing doing. A skipped holiday here, a missed funeral there. Next thing you know, Mom (Angela Finocchiaro) is cooking a big dinner, baking a cake — the works — and birthday girl Alessandra is a no show. Put-upon workaholic Emilio doesn’t come, either. They won’t even pick up the phone when Dad (Christian de Sica) wants to know what gives?

The little rompicoglionis.

Mom, competing with the neighbor whose doting daughter never misses a visit, is beside herself. They aren’t planning on coming Christmas, either?

So Anna and Carlo decide to play a little “joke.” That aunt’s funeral they skipped? Maybe the aunt left Anna and Carlo a big inheritance. Maybe they’ll let that slip and see just how shallow and “too busy” their kids really are. Anna’s mom (Fioretta Mari) tries to warn them.

“Revenge can be a little bit like getting too drunk,” she intones (in Italian, or dubbed into English). “When you need to stop, you’re unable to.”

The parents set up the trick with a bit of ghosting and a little conspicuous consumption — designer clothes for her, a (rented) Ferrari for him. Lo and behold, the prodigal children return, all attentive and affectionate and what not.

Sure, Emilio still gives his mom his laundry. And yes, Alessandra’s kind of adrift, having taken a job as a dentist’s receptionist and live-in lover, with vacation plans for every holiday.

But hey, nothing’s more important than family, right?

Writer-director Giovanni Bognetti (“I, Babysitter”) takes a shot at making this inconsequential comedy come off. First, things blow up on the callow kids. Then the parents are trapped in their web of lies and things blow up on them.

The leads are pretty bland, and the only supporting player to register is Alesssandro Betti, who plays Emilio’s abusive boss who is one of those who hears “money” and changes his tune. A little.

Nobody in this is likable, nothing about this is all that interesting and in the end, that whole “pointlessness” business kind of makes you wonder where where your 90 minutes went.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Christian de Sica, Angela Finocchiaro, Dharma Mangia Woods,
Claudio Colica, Alessandro Betti and Fioretta Mari.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Bognetti. A Sony film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:30

Silent cinema isn’t for everyone, because not everyone is curious about the building blocks of modern cinema, how filmmakers from the era before “Babylon,” before the talkies, invented the language and techniques of storytelling with a camera.

But if you’re curious how an oft-filmed tale looked in its original, silent incarnation, if you want to know about erased female film pioneers, if you’ve immersed yourself in the canon of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock or Chaplin, you might find yourself drawn to their earliest work, before microphones were added to film sets.

The Austrian Fritz Lang made the landmark early sci-fi thriller “Metropolis” and the murderer-hunted-down classic “M” before migrating to Hollywood and making his mark there with many films, “The Big Heat,” “Rancho Notorious” and “The Blue Gardenia” among them.

His influence on the genre defined as “film noir” by French critics could have just as well been labeled “Dunkel Film,” since a German-speaking Austrian filmmaker had such a big role in defining it.

Lang’s themes of crime and punishment, conspiracy and guilt became something like his calling cards over his long career. But when did that get its start? His “Doctor Mabuse” movies? “M?” His early silents?

The one-eyed World War I veteran was just three films into his directing career — he got into movies via scenario writing — when he brought “The Spiders” movies to audiences in 1919 and 1920. They were adventure serials, two one hour films, with two more planned and never made. A treasure-hunting tale built around an American adventurer, Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt), they pitted him against a nefarious, secretive Chinese-founded crime organization named for its calling card — spiders.

Lang’s lifelong obsession with evil conspiracies and criminal masterminds, the persistent threat of organized criminal malevolence, is all over this lively, action-packed thriller.

Silent cinema in America was wholly primitive pre-“Birth of a Nation,” and still almost unwatchable pre-1920. A few Chaplin comedies are the exception, but by and large, the acting was overdone, presentational mime, the worst habits of the Victorian stage preserved on film well into the Edwardian era.

But the acting is startlingly natural in “The Spiders,” the fights and shootouts chaotic and perilous and the variety of settings, “researched” and envisioned by a German university’s ethnography department, an opening credit tells us, quite striking for a film from just-defeated post-war Germany.

Fay Hoog finds a literal message in a bottle, a location of an Inca treasure scrawled by a doomed adventurer we see toss the bottle into the sea just as he’s murdered in Peru. Fay puts on his tux and tells the others swells at his San Francisco club that he’s dropping whatever he’s doing to go and find it.

Oddly, he will do this alone. No “expedition” for him.

But “The Spiders,” a well-heeled organization of the entitled rich and their Chinese underworld partners, are determined to steal the directions to this treasure and get there before Fay. Their best agent, Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) organizes an expedition with Dr. Telphas (Georg John). Because unlike the pistol-packing Fay, she has an idea of how hard this will be.

Their cat and mouse chase begins on the long train ride south, continues as Fay makes escapes by horse and even hot air balloon, which Fay parachutes out of, with many assorted complications on their way to their meeting with destiny and the Last of the Incas.

Over the course of the two films — titled “The Golden Sea” and “The Diamond Ship” — the quest will change, from Inca gold to a Buddha-shaped diamond. But the rivals will remain the same. Bodies will turn up with spider dolls on their chest. And Fay will take sailing barquentines, motorcars and biplanes in his efforts to save this or that damsel, find treasure and take down The Spiders, or as they and these films about them were called in German, “Die Spinnen.”

Silent films were much easier to export than talking movies, so a film like this would have played far and wide, anywhere a projector could be had and the audience could be relied on to ignore recent history and its enemy combatant (German) origins.

That played a hand in this “lost” film’s recovery. If you become as famous as Fritz Lang, film historians are going to look for that earliest work. And if its only available in pieces from prints or negatives scattered all over the world, they’ll make the effort.

That explains the different shades of monochrome in this 1970s restoration. Lang was still living when that process started, and reminded the restorers that sequences were tinted into something resembling color here and there, and helped with the continuity, which is still choppy and not the easiest “simple” story to follow.

The acting impresses, as do the stunts, no matter how they faked them. An early scene, showing assorted spiders passing the word, via phone calls, features five talking figured matted (part of the film frame left unexposed) into the same shot, an impressive effect for the day.

Looking back on it from 100 years later, simple things like how train travel looked in the day, and a couple of still-used-for-commerce tall sailing ships are employed as sets might be the most impressive images. Whatever Hollywood and modern cinema do to recreate such vessels, the real thing is a striking image — towering masts of wood and vast arrays of rope rigging, sails and crew who knew how to work them.

Seen today, “The Spiders” can seem a pretty primitive affair. Racial attitudes and racial depictions flirt with being cringeworthy, and the narrative — with those German university ethnographers not pointing out that “Incas” as an organizing culture were 350 years dead by the time this movie was made — leaves something to be desired.

Lang’s ongoing obsession with crime is hinted at, but the guilt and punishment that became signature subjects and subtexts of his films would come later, after the suspicious death of his first wife in 1921. When you’re cheating on her and she dies with your military service pistol, either by suicide or perhaps even murdered by the filmmaker who would become famous, lifelong “guilt” is a given.

It’s still fascinating to any film buff to see the sort of ambitious work Lang was attempting in his 20s, just as his career was beginning, just as the image language of the cinema was being codified for all time.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, Lil Dagover, Georg John and Bruno Lettinger

Credits: Scripted and directed by Fritz Lang, a Declar-Bioscop AG film on Kino Lorber, Tubi, Amazon etc.

Running time: two films, shown together, 2:10