Movie Nation

“The Book of Clarence” is no mere lampoon of the belief system based on a persecution, blood sacrifice and murder by the state origin story.

It’s a retelling, resetting and often amusing examination of “knowledge” vs. “faith,” the nobility of a religion with “kindness,” “charity” and love folded into its teaching, and the inability to “know” what went down 2000 years ago in a place with no cell phones to record and stream events as they actually happened.

It is distinctly British and univerally Black. And in a time of open and “quiet-part-out-loud” white racist Christian-Nationalism, it’s downright bracing.

It’s no accident that British writer-director Jeymes Samuel opens his film with a crucifixion, a nod to Britain’s most infamous and hilarious send-up of Christianity, “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” which ended with a comical take on that gruesome form of execution. Samuel treats it dead seriously, if not as piously as Mel Gibson — who allegedly filmed his own hands driving in the spikes — in “The Passion of the Christ.”

That sets the tone for the movie. “Clarence” is sometime silly, but just as serious-minded as can be, irreverant, but never really what any serious person would describe as “blasphemous.”

LaKeith Stanfield has the title role, that of a hustler, a chancer and seller of smokeable “herbs” in the Lower Jerusalem of 33 C.E. We meet he and his running mate Elijah (RJ Cyler of “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”) as they’re chariot racing that resident badass, Mary Magdelene (singer/choreographer/actress Teyona Taylor) along the cliffside, cobbled streets of Jerusalem (Italy), and losing.

A blow-dart armed gang calling itself The Gypsies, led by a runt (Chase W. Dillon) proves their undoing.

Facing their financial back, the loan shark and gang leader Jedidiah the Terrible (Eric Kofi-Abrefa) is too much to bear, at the moment. His sister, Clarence’s crush (Anna Diop) can’t help. Perhaps all these insults from Clarence’s twin brother and his mother (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, stunning here, famous for “Secrets & Lies” and “Without a Trace”) have some advice he can actually use.

This “nobody,” as his twin, the Apostle Thomas, follower of Jesus of Nazareth labels him, needs to “Be the body, not the shadow,” his mother tells him. Do SOMETHING of note and noble import.

That’s how Clarence, “the village mischief maker” decides to become “the 13th Apostle.” First problem? He doesn’t know how to pronounce “apostle.” The “T” is silent, mate. But there’s a bigger issue.

“God doesn’t exist,” Clarence insists. This “Jesus” fellow is a “false prophet” who does “tricks.”

As that kind of rules out his inclusion in the crew that includes “doubting” Thomas and Judas Iscariat (Michael Ward, slick and sinister), perhaps Clarence should study this “messiah” hustle and set himself up as one. He will sell his version of a holy creed.

“Knowledge is greater than belief.”

And as he’s seen “all the MONEY they (Jesus & Co.)” take in, he will settle his debts by fleecing the gullible.

“I’m just playin’ the cards I was dealt.”

Writer-director Samuel, no longer going by his nom-de-music “The Bullits,” gave us the mixed-bag Black Western “The Harder They Fall.” “Clarence” similarly sends-up Biblical epics (titles and credits resemble “The Ten Commandments” — the movie, not the tablets). But Samuel’s aim is higher and more sure this time, a parody that turns to satire as it speaks to Greater Truths and comments on the Black experience in the White Western world today.

When a Black mother wails that brutish white Romans (Tom Glynn-Carney, Thomas Vaughan-Lawlor and most venomous of all James McAvoy) are “always taking our babies,” she isn’t just talking about ancient Romans.

“Clarence” is a flippant film of group dances and herb-peddling on the streets, of stonings and smokers floating into the ether at the hookah joint, of everybody complaining about everybody else’s “smell,” and of a hero who resents just how many people he knows pronounce his name as “one syllable.” “Clairnce.”

Omar Sy is ferocious as Barabbas, a figure spared crucifixion while Jesus is sacrificed in the Bible, here an enslaved gladiator who considers himself “immortal” save for a particularly vulnerable “heel” (Wonder where he, or writer-director Samuel, got that idea?).

David Oyelowo is hilarious as a slap-happy John the Baptist, who will drown a “Negro” disbeliever, especially if he really needs a bath.

Alfre Woodard makes a warm, wise and wry Mother Mother, whom Clarence consults to see just how her boy Jesus does his “tricks.”

“My dear child, find faith and you will find all of the answers you need.”

Samuel’s film is an embarassment of acting riches, laugh-out-loud funny when it wants to be and thought-provoking when it dares to be. It tests “faith” and forces us to consider the Black experience of Christianity even as it embraces a more rational approach to belief than one offered by the Black church, and indeed the white one.

And Stanfield, by turns droll, wry, thoughtful and soulful, makes a grand tour guide for this satire and study of a value system — kindness, compassion, charity — that has more value for its true believers than dogmatic demands of “belief.”

He may be a “false prophet.” But this Clarence fellow and his “Book” are well worth mulling over.

Rating: PG-13 for strong violence, drug use, strong language, some suggestive material, and smoking.

Cast: LaKeith Stanfield, Omar Sy, RJ Cyler, Alfre Woodard, David Oyelowo, Anna Diop, James McAvoy, Marianne Jean Baptiste, Michael Ward, Teyana Taylor, Eric Kofi-Abrefa and Benedict Cumberbatch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeymes Samuel. A Sony Tristar release.

Running time: 2:16

“Roadkill” is a leaden, lumbering C-movie about serial killings on the backroads of Florida back in the ’80s.

For his second feature, writer, director and co-star Warren Fast (“Finding Grace”) reaches back for a “drive in” era motors-and-murders thriller about a “Highway Hunter” terrorizing the good folks along the stretch of the state nicknamed “Florabama” with good reason.

It’s got a bombshell who wears midriff-baring shirts, tight jeans (suitable for “Daisy Duke” cutcoffs) and sucks a lollipop like a pro, a Jesus-coiffed drifter who hitches a ride with her, vintage cars and vintage gas stations and diners and a good ol’boy sheriff who is no more a “good” old anything than most Florida sheriffs, then and now.

What it doesn’t have is much of a story, interesting characters or an editor who can hide bad acting, crap dialogue, limp plotting and nonsensical twists by “fixing it in post” after the damage has already been done on the set.

Ryan Knudson, still wearing his Southern Protestant Jesus hair and beard from a recent “Revelations” mini-series, plays “The Hitchhiker,” a fellow with a dark past, his nightmares tell us. His Momma (Christina R Gregg) treated him like a dog, and killed his dog so he wouldn’t “have to share your dogfood” or the doghouse she made him sleep him in.

The Hitchhiker is a slow walker and slow talker. But he winds up in the 1969 Chevy Nova of a 1983 Playmate of the Month candidate, The Driver (Caitlin Carmichael of “Midnight in the Switchgrass” and “Wheelman”).

They’re on the road to somewhere. Or nowhere. No names are exchanged, no backstories are explained.

“I get the feeling, no matter what happens, I don’t think I’m gonna get where I’m going with you,” he drawls.

They’re hassled by the sheriff (writer-director Fast) before events circle around to put them both in his custody. Seems this “Highway Hunter,” a dormant serial killer, is back on the clock, killing service station attendants, short order cooks, random folks hither and yon.

One or both of the people in that sadly souped-up Chevy has got to be a suspect.

The violence here is grisly but still lacking in credibility. The chases are sleep-inducing. The effects — the driving scenes are all green-screen projections — primitive.

The prologue, with The Hitchhiker dreaming of the hell growing up was for him, is given a grainy, scratched celluloid film treatment, maybe the stupidest waste of an effect I’ve seen since my days of judging student films.

It’s just a genre picture, so the bar is low. A few decent ideas and a little more skill in making one’s twists and surprises pay off might have given this a chance of working. I mean, they had a mantrap/femme fatale suitable for any drive-in movie pinup poster.

But the whole enterprise just lies there, squished and rotting on the tarmac.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Caitlin Carmichael, Ryan Knudson, Trenton Hudson, Danielle Harris, Christina R. Gregg, Buddy Campbell and Warren Fast

Credits: Scripted and directed by Warren Fast. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:29

“Semi animated,” this irreverent “interview” show has a whiff of the old “Colbert Report” as well in its ideological dope asking idiotic questions.

This time, the animated host (shades of “Space Ghost from Coast to Coast” and “Fetch”) is an unpopular NPR host with a gift for inane, insipid touchy feely queries.

Looks funny. Mike Judge may have a winner on his hands.

It stands to reason that a movie about a haunted pool swallowing children and adults would absolutely have to have extraordinary underwater photography, just by design.

“Night Swim” manages that, so a tip of the scuba mask to underwater director of photography Ian S. Takahashi (“Under the Silver Lake,” “The Lost City”). The scenes beneath the surface, looking up or looking down, with victims struggling against whatever is after them, are just beautifuly lit and shot.

The movie? It’s middling, even by early January horror release standards. A few moments of suspense, a belated “Maybe I should play this guy as funny/crazy” decision by leading man Wyatt Russell, a little “It!” and not much else in terms of inspiration, and effects that don’t add to the fear quotient sends this sinker down for the third time.

In 1992, a little girl (Ayazhan Dalabayeva) is lured to the pool in her bunny slippers in the middle of the night so that she can retrieve her kid brother’s toy boat — which had disappeared and is how circling the pool, under its own power.

Before wee Rebecca can scream “Toy boat toy boat toy boat,” nothing but a floating bunny slipper remains.

Decades later, and third baseball Ray Waller (Russell, son of Goldie and Kurt) and his family decide to move into the house with the pool in back. He’s dealing with the onset of multiple sclerosis, his doctor is empathetic but no-nonsense.

“Forget baseball.”

He’ll have to live off educator wife Eve’s (Kerry Condon of “Three Billboards,” “The Banshees of Inisherin” and TV’s “Ray Donovan) insurance and income, rooting for his aspiring swimmer daughter (Amélie Hoeferle) coaching his little boy (Gavin Warren) in America’s Pastime, despite the crutch he now uses.

That pool? That’s therapeutic. Ray soon proves that as his symptoms abate and he feels as if he might get another shot at the Big Leagues, all thanks to the “land of sky blue waters” that fills that pool.

But the wife and the kids soon have other experiences when they swim — voices from the overflow drains, items disappearing, hallucinations about who is peering over the edge down at them, mistaking swimming down for swimming up, living corpses sneaking up on them, holding them under water.

“Marco Polo” becomes a game with a menacing edge under those conditions. But only slightly.

The “rules” of writer-director Bryce McGuire’s world are explained in the third act, and don’t add up to much.

The build-up towards a “Jaws” style “pool party” that’s as ill-advised as opening the Amity beaches on July 4 is mostly-botched. There just isn’t much suspense in the death-comes-from-the-pool scenes that we haven’t seen in the film’s trailers.

But the underwater attacks, escapes and revelations are gorgeous to look at, with a lot of the cast and the effects crew immersing us in the perils of a pool, even if they never get a handle on how frantic drowning and near-drowning is as an experience.

Any more than anybody REALLY gets a handle on how one would likely respond to the terrors of facing something supernatural and evil.

One or two “Minnesota” touches, provided by the dizzy realtor (Nancy Lenehan), and Russell deciding to occasionally make the increasingly unhinged Ray comical as well as possessed and evil aren’t enough to save it.

“Night Swim” never amounts to much more than a dip in lukewarm water.

Rating: PG-13 for terror, some violent content and profanity

Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amélie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Nancy Lenehan, Eddie Martinez, Ayazhan Dalabayeva and Jodi Long.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bryce McGuire. A Blumhouse/Universal release.

Running time: 1:38

“Stroking an Animal” is a dull, pretentious Catalan “four seasons with a polyamorous threesome” melodama in which not a lot happens. Well, not a lot that involves people with their clothes on.

Pointing itself at the “obvious” flaws in such an arrangement — “obvious” to those not in it, or “into” it — it meanders towards a conclusion as inconclusive as its introduction.

Mariña and Ada (Lidia Veiga, Ánxela Ríos) are really into each other and into “it” as the film opens on a heavy-duty makeout session, sans clothes, shot in a near blur of extreme close-ups.

When they’re done, we realize they were in a tent in the Pyrnees, as they exit and finish off their frolic with a topless dip in a mountain stream.

A bearded, topknotted hipster (Xulio Besteiro) strolls up and captures them on his camcorder. He’s not just a creep spying on lesbians, which would have been dramatic, if cliched. We quickly realize he’s part of this arrangement as he joins in on their carnal carrying on.

Tomás, as we eventually learn his name to be, is their third wheel. Everybody’s experimenting, relishing every chance to share a bed and the forbidden fruit of a non-monogamous relationship.

But all this “Stroking an Animal” is going to lead to jealousy, hard feelings and “tests” of the depths of love. Or so every other movie to dabble in the subject has taught us.

In Ángel Filgueira’s aimless, mostly drama-starved “Cando toco un animal,” the “seasons” or chapters — there are more than four here — are introduced by quasi-poetic musings in written, graphic form — thoughts on dragonflies, cats, this and that.

“I read that cats bite when the can’t containt the love that they feel inside.”

Symbolic? Maybe.

“Biting” is about the time trouble sets in as SOMEbody wants a little more of SOMEthing that SOMEbody else can’t give her, sexually.

These chapters, in Galician with English subtitles (like the dialogue), are written by Mariña, we learn, a writer who is sort of participant/observer to all this.

Only she isn’t. Filgueira has made a movie with no actual point of view, no protagonist for the audience to identify with, to lead us through the bare bones of this “story.”

Stripped of story (mostly) and drama (almost entirely), what we’re left with is a lot of coital coupling and thrupling. Take away the “chapter” headings and this is straight-to-video titilation, and not all that titilating at that.

Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity

Cast: Lidia Veiga, Ánxela Ríos and Xulio Besteiro

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ángel Filgueira. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:09

The director of “The Harder They Fall” Western is behind the camera for this riff on a contemporary of Jesus “inspired” to live a “divine” life, or fake it until he makes it.

LaKeith Stanfield stars, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Alfre Woodard, Omar Sy, James McAvoy, Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Teyana Taylor dressing up the supporting cast in this BCE satire, which opens Jan. 12.

A serial killer is on the loose, murdering “foreign workers” in Taiwan. Let’s put our best detective on the case! You know, the one we meet just as she’s attempting to commit suicide in the same car where her partner/lover pulled the trigger on himself.

“The Abandoned” is a “by the book” police procedural serial killer thriller. The “book” in this case means no genre trope can be passed by, no melodramatic flourish left out.

A couple of decent twists, some good performances and two grimly realistic third-act fights recommend this new film from the director of “Double Date,” Ying-Ting Tseng. Everything else? Tried and true and kind of worn out.

Janine Chun-Ning, no newcomer to the genre herself (cop web and TV series, etc.) is Det. Wue Jie, still wracked by grief, still living in the car where her beloved killed himself a year before. She’s just about to put a second hole in the roof via a bullet through her chin when she’s interrupted by a woman being chased by hooligans.

Hunting along the waterfront for them, she finds a body. By the time the coroner gets hold of the corpse, with signs of ritualistic murder, she’s found her purpose. She will find out who this woman was — fingerprints have been removed — and track down her murderer.

Her gruff boss (veteran character actor Wei-min Chen) tells her “All I ask is for you to be OK.” Oh, and that she take the perky rookie (Chloe Xiang) along and show her how to investigate a murder before accepting a transfer to some less stressful department.

They’ll need to dig into Taiwan’s “foreign worker” underworld — with its human trafficking, fake IDs, “dissapearances” and the racism that drives the indifference such cases invite. They’ll need to hurry, because flash-forwards in the opening scene have shown us a woman tied up in an underground lair, awaiting her murder, and that what we’re watching unfold begins “five days earlier.”

We also meet Lin You-sheng (Ethan Juan), a grumpy grocer who plays a part in all these Thai, Vietnamese and Filipino “foreign workers” slipping into the country. Lin You-Sheng fell for a Thai woman he helped, who dumped him when he wouldn’t get serious.

When her sister (Sajee Apiwong) shows up, telling him his ex has “gone missing,” we put things together before he does.

Waree was her name. She’s already dead. And thanks to his ties to her and to that underworld, we have our Prime Suspect.

There’s interesting detail in the police work and the modus operandi of those helping these workers get in and go underground. But much of what we’re treated to is straight-up melodrama.

Want to test how much the ex-lover Lin is upset by Waroo’s murder? Get a cop to go undercover at the station, pretend to be a handcuffed suspect, and taunt the grieving man with a racist “Thais are dirty…you’ll catch a disease” tirade to see if it sets him off.

Some of the trickier parts of the case — IDing the body, for instance — are dispensed with via anonymous phone calls. That’s lazy. We meet the killer early on, hear explanations of such a mass murderer’s “motivations,” but see little of that.

All the fake names and peripheral characters are added to the mix just to throw the viewer off the scent of a seriously formulaic story — suicidal cop/irritable boss/rookie partner who has to prove herself, all chasing a serial killer.

“They say the corpse chooses the cop” sounds like a line from a half dozen Hollywood films and many a TV police procedural episode.

Twenty-four minutes were cut from this thriller — which plays out in Mandarin, Thai and Min Nan with English subtitles for Netflix — thank goodness.

It’s solid enough, with a little suspense in the third act. But the main thing “The Abandoned” accomplishes is showing that police picture tropes translate to most any language, and translated or not, it’s very hard for one to manage more than a surprise or two in between the cliches.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Janine Chun-Ning Chang, Ethan Juan, Chloe Xiang, Wei-min Chen and Sajee Apiwong

Credits: Directed by Ying-Ting Tseng, scripted by Pin Chun Lin, Yi-Chen Yang and Ying-Ting Tseng A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

Every now and then, some piece of music turns up in a (horror movie, usually) that makes me do a double take, or if I’m imbibing, a spit take.

How did (whoever the music supervisor/the star/the director) they pull that song out of the air for this movie at this moment?

Whoever supervised the pop hit clearances for “Night Swim” stumbled across (no WAY they would have remembered it) this tune by a fellow who not only once attempted a mustache, he infamously crooned about a dead skunk in the middle of you-know-where.

I know it because I worked in folk-music friendly public radio for a few years. And I interviewed LWIII a few times. Many times. He’s an actor, too. Crooned in “The Aviator” as a big band singer, plucked and played through rehab with Sandra Bullock in “28 Days.” I caught up with him on the set of that picture.

This song is a happy little ditty from the son of a magazine columnist, a fellow who used to be married to folkie Kate McGarrigle, with whom he fathered Rufus. Perfect ironic tune for a killer swimming pool picture, I think Loudon W. would agree.

One’s first new film of the new year, even when it’s previewing in the “Pre stained for your comfort” local AMC, gives one a warm feeling.

Or perhaps that’s the AMC nachos talking.

“Night Swim” opens Thursday, it’s previewing on Wed. Night with a Thursday afternoon embargo on reviews.

Expectations are thus lowered to DeSantis size.

Chilling. Very clever manipulation of action — so many people walking backwards, out of scenes and into further peril.

Bill Nighy, Sonia Braga, Nell Tiger Free and Ralph Ineson headline the cast of this debut feature by Arkasha Stevenson, a prequel “reboot,” as it were.

April 5.