Movie Nation

A young Belarusian immigrant finds himself questioning his “deal” with the French Foreign Legion — enlistment and service in exchange for citizenship — after a particularly brutal combat encounter in “Disco Boy,” a dreamy Immigrant’s Experience Odyssey from writer-director Giacomo Abbruzzese.

Abbruzzese, a documentary filmmaker making his fictional feature debut, tells a story of outsider struggle and a sort of shared victimhood between the Belarusian who joins the Legion for citizenship in a better country with the promise of a better life, and a young man from Niger who sees his country and people still exploited by its former colonial masters, who are all European and often French.

Our tale takes two young men, Alex and Mikhail, from their wily escape from Belarus through Poland to France. Only one survives. His journey is a terrible trial and takes days. At the end of it, his easy pass into French life is joining the Foreign Legion, a largely-immigrant force that trades fighting service for citizenship and “a new life.”

Alex will be tested by the usual boot camp ordeals. And he will come to question the entire bargain when he’s sent as part of an elite team that must ignore the other horrors of a conflict zone and only rescue the French hostages who are their mission.

Alex (Franz Rogowksi) is destined to run afoul of Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a young African revolutionary fighting in the Niger River Delta, whose group kidnaps French oil workers and others to draw the world’s attention to their plight via foreign media coverage. And if Alex and Jomo must tangle, Jomo’s sister Udoka (Laetitia Ky) is sure to be drawn into this conflict.

Abbruzzese serves up revolutionary PR and messaging — “performing” for an American (Vice) TV reporter — and gives us vivid first-person combat experience, commandos with radio coms and night-vision fighting gear who find themselves in a shootout with river rebels in the dark, with Alex fighting to the death with one foe seen only in a heat signature.

And we see the tribal life, ritual dances and African world interrupted by the intrusion of foreigners and their lust for oil.

It’s a somewhat unfocused narrative, relying on music and “disco” dance as a bonding device, one of a few novel touches in a story that’s all-too-familiar, with the Croatian-French drill instructor (Leon Lucev) being the one novelty in the boot-camp-to-combat film formula.

Their sergeant leads the men in “No Je ne regrette rien” as a marching song. That and the cryptic, curative dance-off finale break free of the cliches of the genre just enough to make “Disco Boy” worth taking in.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Franz Rogowski, Morr Ndiaye, Leon Lucev, Michal Balicki and Laetitia Ky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giacomo Abbruzzese. A Charades release.

Running time: 1:38

This looks lovely, affectionate and nostalgic. Speaking as someone who was a celluloid projectionist in college and a cinema critic pretty much ever since, I mean.

There are worse ideas than resetting “Alice” of ”Through the Looking Glass/in Wonderland” fame as a culinary horror comedy about cooking for vampires. Any non-vampire sucked into that world is going to have it “explained” to her the way so much had to be shown, introduced or explained to Lewis Carroll’s heroine, after all.

But “Alice and the Vampire Queen” is a lumbering, stumbling affair, a cute idea in search of the pacing, pulse-pounding suspense and punchlines that might have made it come off.

Writer-director Dan Lantz introduces us to a beaten-down Alice (Shelby Hightower), an abused ex-con chef who can’t even hold a job at a greasy spoon, offered the chance to make steak tartare and its fresh-kill variations for Dinners with the Vampire queen (Brenna Carnuccio) and her “court.”

The picture takes too long to set up, and a bit longer than we’d like to “make the sale,” arm-twisting Alice into this new gig.

“You can either make the meal, or be the meal” is understood, even if Lantz figures it needs to be said in this tiresome telling.

“Cooking for bloodsuckers” will be tricky, she’s warned by her human “head hunter,” Charles (Graham Wolfe). She’ll have to hold back her revulsion, which isn’t that hard to do thanks to a gruesome past she and Charles know about. And she’ll have to train her assistant chef, creepy Gordon (Chris James Bolan), who doesn’t appear to know what a “sous-chef” is.

“Like, an Indian?”

The vampire “court” is colorful…ish. The venue, complete with blood-letting floor-shows, almost passes muster.

But the poor pacing means that even characters that might have clicked, come-uppance scenes that should have paid-off and jokes that should have landed don’t.

This Dinner with Vampires is a few courses short of being a meal.

Rating: unrated, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Shelby Hightower, Graham Wolfe, Brenna Carnuccio, Rachel Aspen, Xavier Michael, Chris James Bolan, Aaron Dalla Villa and Danielle Muehlen.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Lantz. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:31

Anjana Vasan, Lolly Adefope and Gemma Jones also star in this colorblind casting 1920s farce.

Looks quite the hoot, wot wot? Feb. Release in the UK.

The creators of “Chernobyl” got into business with Netflix and Adam Sandler for this existential drama.

Off brand for Sandler, no matter how many “serious” pictures he’s done. Paul Dano is the voice of the space spider in this Czech astronaut’s head.

March 1.

It is known by many titles — “Monster of London,” “L’Orchidée rouge” “Secret of the Red Orchid” and, in its original language — German — “Das Rätsel der roten Orchidee.”

And if this almost campy, daft and dumb crime thriller from Deutschland is remembered at all, it’s because future horror legend Christopher Lee and Werner Herzog muse Klaus Kinski were among its stars.

But a twisty German-language thriller about American gangsters battling for control of London dubbed (in this case) into English? We are…intrigued.

No, it’s not very good. But there are flashes of wit and the odd dash of style shows its face in Helmuth Ashley’s film of an Edgar Wallace pulp novel. Ashley, an Austrian cinematographer-turned-director who worked in Germany, was one of the first to film a G.K. Chesteron “Father Brown” mystery (“Das schwarze Schaf”) and cranked out thrillers based on pulp fiction, The Lindbergh Baby kidnapping and Brit traitor/spy Kim Philby in German.

He knew what he was doing, even if he lacked the light touch he seemed to be going for.

A poker game in 1960 Chicago is interrupted, St. Valentine’s Day Massacre style, with a brisk machine-gunning. Who gets away? The Minelli mobster, Kerkie (Eric Pohlmann) who planned it, and the O’Connor gang member Steve (Kinski) who smelled a rat and dodged death.

One is deported to Italy, the other flees to Europe. They both wind up in London where they try to set up shop, American Gangland style, by sending cut-and-paste threats and FORM letter extortion notes.

If you’re rich, you’re going to get a note — Lord or Sir, wealthy widow or entitled Earl. And chances are, it’s going to be hand-delivered by your manservant, the most-employable butler in all of London, the fey, foppish Parker (comic actor Eddi Arent).

Funny how Parker is hired by everybody who is about to be targeted, more than a few of them to be “hit.”

“I will stand by like the Last Mohican!” he promises, in dubbed English. You’ve got to appreciate that level of loyalty.

Scotland Yard must be summoned. Inspector Weston (Adrian Hoven) is on the case, and making eyes at one potential victim’s secretary, confidante and possible heir, Lilian (Marissa Mell

And there’s Captain Allerman (Christopher Lee), also doggedly on the case, but a lot more inclined to pack heat and pull the trigger (twirling the pistol like a gunslinger afterward) when cornered. Is he meant to be an American hounding the mobsters to London, or is he local? I couldn’t make that out.

With two American mobs angling to grab a piece of the London action, shots will be fired, some of them from submachine guns. And blood will be spilled as the heir to one of the murdered men’s fortunes (Pinkas Braun) returns from his far-off searches for exotic orchids and tries to elbow his way into the proceedings.

The movie doesn’t make as much sense as it might, but the shootouts and showdowns can be fun, and Arent’s goofy, disguise-donning butler takes a decent stab at injecting some humor into all this.

Dubbing was more commonplace in that film era, and many a European production can be viewed where the camera avoids showing the lips of characters in dialogue scenes because they were planning on dubbing their Italian, German, French or whatever picture all along.

The big bucks were in international distribution, a “sale at Cannes,” and even a limited US/UK release could put you in the black.

But here, the two biggest names from the film suffer thanks to that. Not hearing Kinski, who spoke English in later films, or Lee, who spoke five languages fluently — German among them — is a serious detriment to an English-speaking cineaste’s appreciation of “Secret of the Red Orchid.”

The two most distinct, and in Lee’s case, sonorous voices are silenced in the dubbing.

Germany has never been known for its screen comedies, but one gets the sense that Britain’s “Carry On” movies were in the back of director Ashley’s mind in terms of tone. Lee could be funny in any language, and crazy-eyed Kinski had his walking sight-gag qualities. Ashley didn’t yet know that.

But “Red Orchid” is enough of a novelty to be worth checking out, a German attempt at making a semi-comic action mystery-thriller that might find a foothold in foreign markets, just so long as you ignore that the extortion notes pieced together by the American mobsters to put the screws on their British victims are plainly written in German.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Christopher Lee, Marissa Mell, Adrian Hoven, Pinkas Braun, Christiane Nielsen, Eric Pohlmann, Eddi Arent and Klaus Kinski

Credits: Directed by Helmuth Ashley, scripted by Egon Eis (writing as Trygve Larsen), based on a novel by Edgar Wallace.

Running time: 1:24

The screen special effect named Kevin Hart takes a back seat to gadgets, gear and CGI exploits in “Lift,” one hundred or so minutes in which the funnyman tries to remake himself as a cool, rough-and-tumble master thief/romantic lead.

Sure. Worth a try.

Hart produced this high-end heist picture, surrounds himself with a star-studded international cast including Gugu Mbatha-Raw as romantic interest, Jean Reno and Burn Gorman as villains, Vincent D’Onofrio as a colorful colleague and Sam Worthington as a troublesome Interpol cop.

“Set it Off/Straight Outta Compton/Fate of the Furious” director F. Gary Gray was brought in make the planes run on time in this tale of an airborne gold heist.

On paper, this story of art thieves strong-armed into stealing gold from a murderous financier of terrorists might have played. But right from the start, an over-explained art theft that includes kidnapping an identity-hiding NFT artist (Jacob Batalon, always funnier than this) to boost the resale value of the theft, “Lift” fails to get off the ground.

An insistent score by Dominic Kewis and Guillaume Roussel keeps reminding us we should be at the edge of our seat. We’re not. Hart’s presence suggests we’ll at least get some one-liners. But nah, he’s too cool, trying to “stretch” his persona with this lame, clunky caper comedy without laughs and heist thriller short on thrills.

Hart is Cyrus, mastermind who leads a crew that includes pilot Camilla (Úrsula Corberó), master of disguise Denton (D’Onofrio, kind of funny), hacker Mi-Sun (Yun Jee Kim), safecracker Magnus (Billy Magnussen) and I-forget-his-magic-skillset-Luke (Viveik Kalra).

Their mark is a financier/arms dealer/terrorist-backer (Reno), someone Mister Interpol (Worthington) orders Interpol Art Crimes unit cop Abby (Mbatha-Raw of “Belle” and TV’s “Loki”) to make happen.

Hart brings the star-power and Netflix deal that gets this movie made. But all he brings to the picture are a couple of sharp suits, one mid-air fight scene, and a whole lot of “explaining” what just happened/what “really” happened.

You’d think a guy with his ego would demand better dialogue than simple exposition, or lines meant to suggest “history” with “Remember Corsica?” “You remember Paris?” “Remember Venice?”

Yeah, the last one we remember, because “Venice” and an art auction robbery is what opens the picture.

There’s barely a laugh or interesting, much less exciting moment in this. Hart & Co. had little idea that it’s rarely the “heist” that makes a heist picture. It’s the colorful characters (mostly colorless here), the zippy twists and zingy one-liners.

F. Gary Gray should have pointed that out. He’s made a passable “Italian Job” remake, an audience-appreciating “Fast/Furious” film, and a lot of dogs — “A Man Apart,” “Law Abiding Citizen,” “Be Cool,” “Men in Black International.” He, at least, knows the difference between a promising script and one that isn’t remotely on target.

Rating: PG-13, violence, some profanity

Cast: Kevin Hart, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Jean Reno, Sam Worthington, Ursula Corbero, Jacob Batalon, Burn Gormen and Vincent D’Onofrio.

Credits: Directed by F. Gary Gray, scripted by Jeremy Donner and Daniel Kunka. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

There may be an alternate reality where “Big Bang Theory” and “Flight Attendant” veteran Kaley Cuoco could pull off the umpteenth professional assassin one and all agree is “the best” in an action comedy.

But it certainly won’t be one written by the screenwriter of the AI Kate Mara thriller nobody saw, “Morgan” and the director of TV’s “Reacher.”

Whatever you think about the perfunctory action beats — lame car chase, punchup at a subway stop, shootout in a Bavarian pine forest — “charmless” doesn’t really do justice to the corpse “Role Play” turns out to be.

Cuoco is Emma, another assassin-for-hire married to an unsuspecting spouse (David Oyelowo), with two unsuspecting kids. She takes her assignments from the mostly-unseen “Raj” (Rudi Dharmalingam), tells the fam she’s off to “Nebraska” or “St. Louis” for consulting work for “the regional office” or “the home office.”

And nobody asks, no one is the wiser.

But she’s mainly working these days, Raj insists, to pay the bills that keep this killer on “the dark net’s most-wanted list” hidden from Sovereign, an entity that wants her, or wants her dead.

But forgetting their wedding anniversary puts her in a bind. That’s how the murderous professional role player winds up in a swank NYC hotel bar in a little black dress, pretending to be in “finance,” waiting on her eager-to-role-play husband under a different name, but waylaid by a dapper, insistent and pushy older gent (Bill Nighy) who has plainly “made” her.

The deadly game’s afoot, with cops visiting her husband and an old foe (Connie Nielsen) filling the unsuspecting boob on who his wife really is.

The scenes with Nighy have something like a spark about them, banter as professional parry and thrust between vodka martinis and something one could never imagine Bill Nighy ordering in any guise, including that of rival killer “Bob” — “shots.”

“You see that Panamanian diplomant they pulled out of the East River last night?”

Maybe. Maybe not.

“You know the drill, Bob.”

That’s the burden “Role Play” never sheds. We know the drill. Every move, every twist, every quest, every moment of filler pointing us to a finale we see coming an hour off.

Cuoco only plays to her strengths in the Nighy scenes. Oyelowo can handle comedy, as he basically steals “The Book of Clarence.” But he has nothing funny or interesting to play, here.

Nielsen? Whatever. That goes for every cardboard character and every stale twist leading up to her appearance.

Rating: R, graphic violence, sexual situations, alcohol, profanity

Cast: Kaley Cuoco, David Oyelowo, Bill Nighy, Rudi Dharmalingam and Connie Nielsen.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Vincent, scripted by An MGM/Amazon Prime release.

Running time: 1:41

Abe Golfarb makes a reasonably convincing talk-show host confronted by a listener who can predict the beginning events of “End Times” in “First Time Caller,” a deathly-dull thriller severely limited by a lack of visual variety.

Goldfarb, as acerbic chat show host Brett Ziff, smarts-off and insults one and all on his streaming call-in show, “Brett Free…in your heads.” He zings advice to lovelorn Incels and their obsession with “quality women,” ridicules assorted conspiracy nuts and cultists, riffs on Anti-Semitism and punctures pronouns up and down the alphabet.

“Show me someone who’s still ‘non-binary at 50,” he challenges one and all, labeling that a “dorm room fad.”

Insult him back, stick up for an unnamed pop singer in the Taylor Swift mold and “You’re DUN-zo.” Cut-off.

All of which goes out the door when he takes the call from “Leo,” a guy who sounds like he’s “calling from the john,” and not because there’s an echoey quality to Leo’s inane fanboy musings.

Leo occasionally makes a noise like an old man seized up by too-much-cheese. The catch to this constipation is when Leo seizes up, tsunamis happen. And earthquakes. He’s in touch with the menopausal spasms of Planet Earth. He’s predicting the future.

That premise is moderately interesting. We just have to get past how long Brett would have given Leo (voiced by Brian Silliman) to get to some freaking point or other (any talk show host in America would have dumped out of the call within a minute) and find more entertainment value in an hour of visuals of Goldfarb complaining, questioning and grimacing at what he’s hearing, and what he’s confirming by picking up live-streams that go black or video of disasters he can find on the internet.

The film’s modestly-budgeted but not incompetently-made. Some of the talk-show patter is polished.

But the reason your average talk show host is leery of a “First Time Caller” is the risk that they’ll be as unfocused, digression-prone and vocally uninteresting as Leo the Sh–h–se Seer.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Abe Goldfarb, the voice of Brian Silliman.

Credits: Directed by J.D. Brynne and Abe Goldfarb, scripted by Mac Rogers. A Buffalo 8 release.

Running time: 1:15

A lot of living, loving, old grudges and new insights on life are worked out in a day of labor “Under the Fig Trees” of Tunisia, that country’s warm and universally human pick for submission as a Best International Feature Oscar contender.

Erige Sehiri’s compact and sweet story shows us life as it is lived among day laborers — young and old — in a beautiful, Islamic, under-filmed countryside. There’s a winsome tint to its depiction of flirtation and tentative courtship, and a hint of labor and sexual exploitation in its bittersweet undertones.

Fedi Ben Achour is “The Boss,” the gruff young hustler filling two battered Izuzu pickups with women and men — 16-to-60something — to harvest his rented fig orchards. He watches how the big, plump figs are plucked and notes who takes the most care in not breaking the fragile branches as they do.

“Breaking a branch is like breaking your arm,” the older women teach the youngest and newest, Melek (Feten Fdhili) in Arabic (with English subtitles) on her first day.

But Melek is distracted. Her first childhood crush, Aboud (Abdelhak Mrabti) is in today’s workforce, stuffed into a pickup with her. He left years ago, and she scolds him behind a coy, wide-eyed smile about not writing, not reaching out. He makes her heart skip a beat, she openly gushes to a friend.

Her sister Fide (Fide Fdhili) misses this, because she’s the privileged beauty, less conservative and open-minded enough to sit in the cab with the boss, her latest beau.

Sana (Ameni Fdhili) is more Muslim modest in her attire, and sees the burly Firas (Firas Amri) as her love connection. She packs him a lunch each day and figures he’s her future, somebody she can “change” the way Fide wouldn’t mind changing the boorish boss, Saber.

“If he loves me, he’ll listen to me,” Fide reasons.

But it’s the 21st century. The younger pickers have cell phones, Facebook and Instagram accounts, and the alleged freedom to play the field, even out in the Islamic boondocks. And even without cell phone distractions, Fide would turn heads.

Seheri’s sublime second feature (“Railway Men” was the first) doesn’t waste a moment of screen time, setting the couples and the potential conflicts up, pairing young women up with young men (who carefully climb the trees for the higher figs) for work and circumspect, modest discussions about how fig picking and packing is done, how “close-minded” the most religious among them are and how “bogus” “love” is.

Sehiri’s spare marvel of a drama lets us get a glimpse of each’s hardships and bigger concerns — an inheritance that one is being cheated out of, labor that they’re not being paid for, ways to “steal” some of their fruit from the bullying boss. Over lunch, some pray, some nap, some smoke or vape, some play on their phones and others gossip, eat and flirt their way towards what they hope is a secure coupling and marriage.

Good films often make it a point to remind us how the human race is basically the same, everywhere you find it, every shade you find it in, every language you hear coming out of it. That’s a particularly important message to get out with movies from the Arab world.

Sehiri’s Oscar-nomination-worthy film reminds us that at the end of the day, we all labor and stumble into and out of love “Under the Fig Trees.”

Rating: unrated, light violence

Cast: Fide Fdhili, Ameni Fdhili, Feten Fdhili, Abdelhak Mrabti, Gaith Mendassi, Firas Amri and Fedi Ben Achour

Credits: Directed by Erige Sehiri, scripted by Erige Sehiri, Ghalya Lacroix and Peggy Hamann. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:33