Movie Nation

With those darting eyes, sinister glare and a voice that could cut leather, Patrick McGoohan was an actor born to play Iago. But the only time the American-born, British-and-Irish-raised star of “Danger Man” (“Secret Agent Man” in the States), “The Prisoner” and more than his share of films and plays ever got to tackle one of Shakespeare’s great villains was in a movie set in the world of jazz.

“All Night Long” is a shadowy, inky-black/milky white and oh-so-hip artifact, a film full of jazz and jazz greats and Patrick McGoohan at his most villainous, set in London on the cusp of the “Swinging ’60s. Even if it isn’t the most satisfying and edgy modernization of “Othello,” it’s got the cast and camera work of a classic.

And in McGoohan, it’s got a great Iago, here named Johnny Cousin — “Cousin Johnny” in the jazz world — a drummer with big band dreams and devious means of achieving them.

Nel King and Paul Jarrico — a Blacklisted screenwriter who was “Peter Achilles” in the film’s credits — turned Shakespeare’s story of mistrust and treachery into a single-night-in-the-1960s drama with interracial marriage and pot-smoking jazzmen as titilating subtexts.

Veteran director Basil Dearden (“Frieda,” “Dead of Night”) and “The Third Man” cameraman Ted Scaife shot “All Night Long” as a late nod to film noir and editor John D. Guthridge helped turn their arresting images into a veritable long-form jazz music video. Real players appeared in supporting roles — Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus have a duet, and John Dankworth, Tubby Hayes and others pitched in writing tunes and playing in the big ensemble formed and reformed here during this jazz party, playing themselves.

McGoohan? He learned to play the drums and had a drumming coach on set. The sinister scheming part of the role came naturally.

A rich Brit jazz fan (Richard Attenborough) throws a surprise party for a couple of London jazz luminaries, piano-playing bandleader Rex (Paul Harris) and his wife of one year, former jazz singer Delia (Marti Stevens).

Rod Hamilton is such a jazz fan that he turned a warhouse into a multi-level flat with a big open living room built for loud parties and live performances by his many friends in jazz. Mingus is there, practicing his upright bass when Rod gets home.

The surprise party may have a second “surprise,” as Delia’s been rehearsing a number to sing for her husband, despite his wish/command that she retire. The snarkier of the evening’s guests, at drummer Johnny’s prompting, note the “solitary confinement” an accomplished singer agreed to when she married the controlling Rex, who figures he’s “gotten her properly trained,” by now.

Johnny wants to branch out and lead his own band. He wants Delia to sing for it. And he’s not keen on her professional and personal rebuffs, so much so that he sets a plot in motion to wreck the marriage and tie her to horn player Cass (Keith Hamilton), at least in the eyes of Rex.

Johnny also has to stir up problems with Cass and his girl (María Velasco, giving an edge to the film’s second interracial couple), cajole Cass into falling off the wagon, as far as “funny” cigarettes go, and make use of Rod’s in-house tape recording system among his many machinations to break this marriage/band apart and get his own launched.

How far will things go?

Harris gives a performance that takes some of the racial stereotyping out of Shakespeare’s “Moor,” a tad too subdued to suggest a man of mercurial moods and capable of violence.

And the finale “modernizes” the climax to “Othello” in ways that suggest Civil Rights era sensitivities that rob the production of much of the pathos and tragedy of the play.

But there is far too much good going on here to discount this film for those failings. A heated debate about the philosophical nature of music almost turns violent, as quoting someone who claimed that “jazz is appreciated by three groups — Negroes, adolescents (pre Beatles, Motown, etc) and intellectuals” and its implied “Which are you?” was fighting words.

Rex questioning his wife’s joining his “alien world” isn’t referring to jazz. It’s about her marrying a Black man. Johnny’s teasing all that “Rex wouldn’t refuse Delia tonight even if she asked him to move to Johannesburg!”was pretty cutting edge in the UK of ’62.

There’s a lot going on here, even if you’re not a jazz buff. And almost all of it spins around McGoohan, his eyes mostly hooded shadows, his smirk Iago-incarnate. Betsy Blair of “Marty” plays Johnny’s long-suffering wife, and alert viewers will spy an unbilled dancer Geoffrey Holder, as himself, a dancer-guest at the party.

So you’ve got the only actor to turn down playing James Bond twice, and “The Saint” as well, co-starring with a future Bond villain (“Live and Let Die”). Cute.

A recent British Film Institute restoration of “All Night Long” makes the visuals shimmer and the music pulse and pound through a dynamic range uncommon for that era of film. Whatever its shortcomings, the performances archived here — jazzmen and McGoohan — make “All Night Long” a classic you’ll want to remember to catch, even if you think “Lionel Ritchie” every time you hear the title.

Rating: “approved,” violence, drug content

Cast: Patrick McGoohan, Paul Harris, Marti Stevens, Keith Mitchell, María Velasco, Richard Attenborough, Charles Mingus, John Dankworth and Dave Brubeck.

Credits: Directed by Basil Dearden, scripted by Nel King and Paul Jarrico, based on “Othello” by Wm. Shakespeare. A Rank Org. release/BFI restoration on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:31

Another month, another bloated but watchable big bang of a Netflix action movie.

Gal Gadot stars in “Heart of Stone,” a sort of “Kingsmen” riff on all-knowing/all-powerful off-the-books secret agents and their secret agency menaced by even more secretive evil agents and their evil agency.

It’s dumb, but watchable. It’s got a crackling car chase, servicable fights and an epic pair of aerial effects scenes that would do James Bond proud.

Dumb how? Inane dialogue that’s meant to be pithy and punchy.

“Three vehicles, lots of guns.

“Yeah, I could tell from all the bullets!”

“Are you trying to KILL us?”

“Pretty much the opposite, actually.”

Gadot is an MI6 operative, a hacker whose job it is to stay “in the van,” gaining access, hacking phones, opening doors and directing the “agents.” But with a notoriously murderous arms dealer about to escape the mountaintop Alpine casino (How very…Bond.), she doesn’t.

Her team (Jamie Dornan, Jing Luis and Paul Ready) may be in the dark, but it turns out “Stone” is a mole, code-named Nine of Hearts. Her “real” control is the mysterious Jack of Hearts (Matthias Schweighöfer) and her real “boss” is Nomad, the King of Hearts (Sophie Okonedo).

The Charter is a multi-national NGO — an agency led by ex-spies of many nations and run on the probabilities, predictions, paths set up and missions hacked and arranged by an all-seeing/all-knowing computer, “the closest mankind has to perfect intelligence.”

It’s called “The Heart.” And it isn’t anywhere anyone can get at it. Or so they think, until others come for it. There’s a newer, younger hacker (Alia Bhatt) toying with her elders.

That on-the-nose title sets up bad puns, which aren’t played for laughs.

“So I should have listened to ‘The Heart.'”

Well, ugh.

But the chases, brawls and Bondian set-pieces keep this blundering-on-past-its-payoff thriller on the move and perfectly watchable, even if we wince every couple of minutes at the outlandish tech, the over-the-top villainy and the “Bugs Bunny Physics” of impossible stunts.

And Gadot and her stunt team make a willowy, reasonably believable runway-ready heroine “super” in all but name.

There’s not much heart (ahem) to any of this, and most of the twists are hackneyed and predictable. But in the world of overlong, under-edited made-for-Netflix action, it’s on a par with the “Extraction(s),” “Hidden Strike,” “Spiderhead” and “Ava” films the streamer trots out, pretty much one per month.

Rating: PG-13, violence and lots of it

Cast: Gal Gadot, Jamie Dornan, Sophie Okonedo, Jing Lusi, Alia Bhatt, Matthias Schweighöfer and Glenn Close.

Credits: Directed by Tom Harper, scripted by Greg Rucka and Allison Schroeder. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

What late summer crumpet of cute is this?

“Bank of Dave” is an adorably plucky feel-good story from Across the Pond, a “true-ish” tale of hidebound, class-divided Britain and small town neighborliness and compassion confronting a literal “Old Boy’s Club” of British banking.

It’s a comedy about founding a small-town (OK, “city”) bank in Burnley in the unfashionable “north.” More sweet than funny, more sentimental than silly, it’s a generally cut-and-dried but always-cute account of a Quixotic local fighting a rigged system and a London lawyer seduced by local friendliness, and Def Leppard karaoke.

Intrigued? Do read on.

Burnley is just far enough in the hinterlands that Britain’s ancient, austere and financial-crisis-triggering Big Banks can’t be bothered to make loans that tide over businesses, create jobs and build up the tax base for a small city struggling as “the most underserved in Britain” when it comes to health care and everything else.

Dave Fishwick runs a string of “any color you like, so long as it’s white” business van dealerships who’s become a small-scale lendor to many.

“I’m not a bloody bank,” Dave, given a light twinkle by Rory Kinnear, says to one mate whose business finally turned the corner, leading to a generous payback. Dave’s “profits” go to charity.

“Maybe you should be” is all it takes for this local character — a “natural” salesman, Dave “loves the sound of his own voice” — to take on the British banking heirarchy that caused, as it did in America and much of the world, the 2007-8 financial crisis.

Britain’s “Eton and Oxford elite” are the only ones allowed to run banks. No “new” bank has been chartered in the UK in 150 years. They’re snobby, connected and all powerful, and they’re bungling inbreds, “treating the economy like it were their own bloody casino,” is how Dave puts it.

“Game of Thrones” alumnus Joel Fry plays the junior attorney smarmed and arm-twisted into taking on the business of filing the paperwork to the nation’s Financial Regulation Board, a fool’s errand, his amusingly unctuous boss (Angus Wright) insists.

“We’re lawyers, Hugh. We’re on the side of those paying.”

“And if they’re delusional?“

Dave’s got a bit more sense than that. “We have Google in the North, you know.” He wants a “corner shop” sized bank to serve and benefit “Buuuuuurnley.” And he wants to tilt at this particular windmill to make a point.

“I want (the dimissive, insular FRB) to say that the very people who just lost 500 billion quid are the only people entitled to look after our money.”

So what we have here is a fish-out-of-water tale of the stressed C-Class Mercedes lawyer who sees the light thanks to persuasion, first-person observation — the town needs help and Dave’s a stand-up bloke — and warming to the charms of polite, compassionate people and the beautiful, no-nonsense doctor (Phoebe Dynevor) who happens to be Dave’s niece.

It’s a little “Local Hero,” “Coca-Cola Kid” and “Doc Hollywood,” with a heaping helping of “It’s a Wonderful Life” — and karaoke.

Dave’s a regular at the Duck & Drake pub, leading sing-alongs as he covers the greatest hits of Free, Whitesnake and Def Leppard.

Kinnear is the bluff and blowsy salesman heart of this Chris Foggin (“Kids in Love”) comedy. But Fry plays its driving force, the character with the “arc,” traveling from cynically irate (like the viewer, he takes a while to understand the accent) to true believer as he gives Dave his day in magistrate’s court.

Dave and the others have to get him from “Can the Bank of Dave exist” to “SHOULD the Bank of Dave exist.”

Hugh Bonneville lends his get-the-film-made name and classist edge to Sir Charles, a banking world insider out to stop Dave in his tracks.

“Once ordinary start thinking they can get in on the act,” the “Barbarians” will be “at the gate.”

Indeed.

The film has lots of cheesy karaoke and a kind of light artlessness that works almost in spite of itself. Piers Ashworth’s script serves up a lot of just-fun-enough characters — an aged rock promoter (Paul Kaye), a devious ex (Naomi Battrick), “Dave’s first loan” (Cathy Tyson) — to sprinkle the proceedings with supporting player delights.

If the bank is to be a “corner shop” level institution, soo too the movie hasn’t the ambition to be an awards contender or blockbuster. “Dave” manages to be just cute enough to come off, largely thanks to that cast, this setting and its “everybody hates bankers” ethos.

That even carries forth on into FRB meetings, where they freely admit being “entitled, untrustworthy a–holes.”

Yes, that’s true in North America as well. But it sounds better when so-described in that posh accent, you know.

Rating: PG-13, for some profanity, performed in quite the accent.

Cast: Rory Kinnear, Joel Fry, Phoebe Dynevor, Jo Hartley, Cathy Tyson, Paul Kaye, Naomi Battrick, Angus Wright and Hugh Bonneville.

Credits: Directed by Chris Foggin, scripted by Piers Ashworth. A Samuel Goldwyn (Aug 25) release.

Running time: 1:44

Comedy is a quick, and that goes for romantic comedies as well.

“Match Me if You Can” is an indie rom-com that just isn’t — quick or romantic. There are funny lines and a cute moment, here and there. And director Marian Yeager knows that in cinematic terms, comedy plays best when it plays out in playful closeups.

But this wilted rose of late summer doesn’t have 75 minutes worth of jokes, gags and adorable laughs. And it runs for over 100. That’s basic and a bit brutal, but it is what it is.

Georgina Reilly of the cult zombie pic ”Pontypool” stars as Kip, a self-described tech nerd (she’s a coder), “geek” and apparently “unmatchable” online dating applicant. Which causes her to go off on her lonely little blog, nailing the “I Promise” dating service to the wall for its computer-generated “Get a dog” and “unmatchable” response to her answers on their 500 entry questionaire.

Kip is outraged, and who wouldn’t be? It’s one thing to be “ghosted” by this guy or that one, and see him again in her zombie-hunting-in-the-closed-mall cosplaying with her co-workers (including the great Brian George, funny in “Seinfeld,” funnier in “Big Bang Theory” and almost funny here). It’s quite another to have an algorithm ridicule you.

Kip finds herself at loggerheads with “corporate” I Promise, basically a bunch of figureheads in a family business that was founded and is coded by the workaholic “geek” Riley (Wilson Bethel).

You know where this is headed. We all do.

She complains online. Other lonely hearts “feel seen.” She goes viral, it hurts his company so his family comes after her. And they “meet cute,” over an fish tank blowfish, no less.

The laughs must sneak in around the edges — via Kip’s actual pet, a hermit crab named Jones, who walks across her keyboard and thus engages her with I Promise, via the nerd-herd (George, Kanwar Singh and Brad Ofoegbu) in her office, her jerk of a Brit-boss (Charlie Clark) and the banter when Kip and Riley, not knowing who each other are, meet out of context.

“Are you seeing anyone?” “Like, an apparition or…a therapist?”

“I hunt zombies!” “You get medical with that?” “Absolutely. We have full union benefits now.”

“Gay?” “Ryan Reynolds confuses me, but no.”

I have to stop now, because those are literally half the laughs in the picture. The leads land their zingers well, but have no chemistry. The zombie-hunting cosplay doesn’t add up to anything fun. If you’ve seen one tech-company cubicle crew, you’ve seen them all.

A “Spill the Tea” online gossip story thread is never developed into anything amusing, nor is Kip’s bullying boss or Riley’s bland-not-colorful family.

There just isn’t much to work with here, and nothing about “Match” feels new or fresh.

Still, a quicker pace might have helped. Not much. But there’s a reason generations of comic filmmakers have demanded retakes with but one proviso — “Once again, but FASTER.”

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Georgina Reilly, Wilson Bethel, Brian George, Veronica Wiley and Charlie Clark.

Credits: directed by Marian Yeager, scripted by Betsy Morris. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:44

Rory Kinnear has the title role, that of a bloke who wants to charter a small town bank to “help” his friends and other customers.

Lock! Him! Up! the conservatives shout.

Phoebe Dynevor, Paul Kaye, Naomi Battrick, Jo Hartley, Angus Wright, Joel Fry, Cathy Tyson and Hugh Bonneville also star.

This potentially adorable “true” underdog story opens Aug. 25.

That broken record that hits the turntable almost every time I have to review a thriller is skipping again, this time all the way through “The Engineer.”

“PACING,” skip. “PACING,” skip.

This inspired by “true events” picture is about the hunt for the most notorious Palestinian bomb-builder of the mid-90s, the cunning killer nicknamed “The Engineer.” He was the guy who built the vest-bombs that Hamas suicide-bombers wore onto buses and into Israel’s public places, killing scores and rattling the state that they saw as occupiers/tormenters, who took their land and created their own ethnic quasi-theocracy out of it.

Emile Hirsch leads a cast that saunters through this national crisis and frantic manhunt — agents taking a break for card games and the like — while Israel was being torn apart.

The film takes place in 1995, and “Oslo Accords” peace efforts by Israel’s leadership, the Palestinian Authority and U.S. President Bill Clinton were battered by the spiral of violence and reprisals, which climaxed when an Israeli right winger murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

It’s an important piece of recent history undermined in the telling by slack pacing and a film agenda that seems intent on changing the subject re: Israel today, an apartheidist state morphing into authoritarianism.

Hirsch plays Etan, an American-born Israeli Jew suspended from intelligence work — Mossad and Shin Bet are the two agencies involved — for almost murdering a prisoner in custody. His boss (played by Danny A. Abeckaser, who also directed) summons him back with the “I need you, Israel needs you” speech.

There’s nothing for it but to try and talk the wife into taking their son to Marseilles because “nowhere is safe here,” and to work contacts and start rounding up people who know who this Yahya Ayyash (Adam Haloon), aka “The Engineer” is and where he might be hiding, building bombs and training recruits.

“The streets are getting covered in body parts and we’re sitting on our hands!” Etan protests.

But at least Mossad and Shin Bet are working together. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a wild card in the deck.

Robert Davi plays a fictional U.S. senator who loses a daughter in the film’s opening scene bus-bombing, so he hires his own ex-Mossad “friend” (Angel Bononni) to track down that “Engineer” because “I wanna look him in the eye and I want to shoot him myself.” Classic Robert Davi line.

Perhaps that fictional part of the story was inspired by this true one.

So the Israelis have taken any pretext of “due process” gloves off to catch or kill this killer. And now an American has hired a guy who assembles his own ex-Mossad and IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) team to shoot their way through Gaza without worrying about laws or optics.

That conflict isn’t actually a “conflict” here, and the blind alleys and dead ends in the hunt aren’t all that novel. The interrogations aren’t written, blocked, filmed or edited to give the film that “Munich/Zero Dark Thirty” rising suspense.

All involved could still have made this work by amping up their intensity, even as the film does a decent job of using news montages of each fresh horror to remind us of the stakes.

In this performance, Hirsch isn’t a particularly compelling, convincing or emotionally-committed presence to build this film around. The villain is barely sketched in, as if they lost their nerve at portraying Ayyash as a “villain.”

And none of that lets one forget the film’s unsavory pro-torture, pro-assassination, Israel-as-victim-again/change the-subject-from-Dictator-Bibi agenda.

Rating: R, violence, profanity

Cast: Emile Hirsch, Adam Haloon, Angel Bonanni, Tsahi Halevi, Yarden Toussia-Cohen, Danny A. Abeckaser and Robert Davi

Credits: Directed by Danny A. Abeckaser, scripted by Kosta Kondilopoulos. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:32

Regular readers of movie reviews will recognize the words “beautifully-designed” and “handsomely mounted” as film critic speak for “The blind date we’re setting you up with has…a great personality.”

So it is with the lovely-to-look-at, well-cast old school horror tale “The Last Voyage of the Demeter.”

It’s got the great character actor Liam Cunningham going for it, Corey Hawkins as a sturdy lead and David Dastmalchian as a gloomy first mate, a beautifully-worn and recreated 19th century barquentine (‘Ees no a “SCHOONER,” ye lubber screenwriters. Yarrr.) and access to the finest backlot water tank for filming sea stories in all of Europe — in Malta — going for it.

The violence is gory and a Gothic air of dread and “doom” expressed by one and all sets the tone.

But as we know it’s “The Last Voyage,” Dracula’s sea journey from the Balkans to Britain, we know how it comes out, more or less. There’s little urgency or growing alarm about the sense that something is killing the livestock — and not eating it — and biting the crew to death, one member at a time.

It’s violent to an eyes-averting degree, but rarely scary. The script doesn’t follow the “Dracula/Vampire movie” rules, not rigidly, anyway. Dracula is a beast, with little trace of an actor underneath him, little chance he’d pass for a bloke you’d look past in a pub. And the “Demeter” just drifts between abrupt scripted-violence and abruptly-summoned storms, looking good but not really getting the job of frightening us done.

The framing device is the shipwreck on England’s shore that Bram Stoker included in his novel, the narration provided by the captain (Cunningham) and the journey all about how “he got here (the UK)” and started seducing women and biting necks.

Hawkins, of “Straight Outta Compton” and “BlackKklansman,” is Mr. Clemens, a Cambridge-educated doctor and curious man of science who can’t find work because of the color of his skin. A chance intervention on a Bulgarian dock lands him in the Demeter’s small crew, a “charter” trip by sail in the age of steam.

In the hold are a stack of crates embossed with the mark of a dragon. That spooks the locals, who refuse to load the cargo, with at least one of them declining the chance to sign on to sail.

Hawkins must literally “learn the ropes” and the ways of this creaky old windjammer, from the hold to the wheel and masts, the knocking on wood signal used to summon help (it’s heard throughout the ship), and the captain’s grandson Toby (“Oliver Twist” mop-topped Woody Norman).

The crew is a mixed-bag of Slavs and Scandinavians, with the exotic cook (Jon Jon Briones) a religious fanatic who might come in handy. Or not.

But when the new guy stumbles across a stowaway, near death, in the crates — a woman (Aisling Franciosi), aka “bad luck” on a ship — the ship’s fate seems sealed.

“We let Poseidon deal with stowaways,” Wojchek mutters. But there’ll be none of that. Not that it will help. Because as the doctor nurses her back to life, blood is shed.

“Evil is on board,” the men and woman of superstition try to convince the man-of-science doctor. “Powerful evil.”

The script provides a few good lines and the cast a few decent moments. But “old school” Universal horror — dating from the studio’s 1930s history — means “old hat,” in most cases.

Dracula is glimpsed and eventually wholly seen, but has no personality. “Powerful evil” rarely does.

Consulting “the bite-marked Roma girl” provides no new wrinkles to a timeworn tale.

They set out, fight the elements, search and re-search the ship after the rats disappear, the livestock are slaughtered and this or that man on watch dies or disappears. There’s little sense of growing alarm and horror, their greed to collect a bonus is so great that they don’t put in to port, and one and all seem resigned to their fate.

That includes “Troll Hunter” director André Øvredal, who content to make this Universal horror “universe” look beautifully lived-on, gruesomely died-in, and “handsomely mounted” when what it wants is the rising dread and blasts of terror that the name “Dracula” has inspired for over a ce

Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence

Cast: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, David Dastmalchian, Woody Norman, Stefan Kapicic, Javier Botot, Nikolai Nikolaeff and Liam Cunningham.

Credits: Directed by André Øvredal, scripted by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:58

Layers of hurt and pieces of a puzzle peel away over the course of Kôji Fukada’s “Love Life,” a forlorn and downbeat drama with dissonant dramedy touches.

It’s intriguing yet so slow and quiet as to test one’s patience, duller than his manga adaptation, “The Real Thing,” and something of a “Yes, and?” letdown.

A couple preps for a celebration, but we don’t know what it is that’s being celebrated.

Wife Taeko (Fumino Kimura of “Love for Beginners”) dotes on their six year old, Keita, accepting his many challenges to play “Othello” with him.

Husband Jirô (Kento Nagayama of “The Pass: “Last of the Samurai”) does the cooking and decorating. And he’s arranged for some friends at work to stage a little display with balloons waving placards that spell out “Congratulations.”

She interrupts her day to rush out and mediate another dispute between the homeless and someone who’s antagonized them. That’s her job, working with social services for the homeless. He has work in another state social service office.

Something is riding on this party, the first since their wedding. There’s bad blood with his parents — his father, in particular.

And his co-workers, organizing those placards, are a tad put-out when Yamazaki (Hirona Yamazaki) from the office insists on taking part. We hear (or read the English subtitles) the first whispers about what might be a little “off” here.

Yamazaki was Jirô’s ex. “He cheated on her” with Taeko, the woman he just married. And she’sthe one bringing the balloons.

Taeko’s son is from a previous marriage. Her first husband walked out on her.

Even though the party seems to come off, despite the clouds hanging over it, his Dad uses the first opening he hears to lash out at the “cast off (second hand)” wife. His apology isn’t all that impressive, but eventually the evening starts to seem like a success,” acceptance” at last.

Until, that is, the child has an accident. That tragedy tears at the couple as her ex, Park Shinji (Atom Sunada), shows up and emotionally-stunted Jirô starts wondering about the beautiful Yamazaki he wronged to marry Taeko.

Fukada picks at the emotionally raw parents via the tactless police inquiry. “Why didn’t you adopt the boy?” the cops ask Jirô.

Taeko wants to bring the body “home,” to an apartment that belongs to his folks, before the funeral. And that flips his mother out. “What will the NEIGHBORS say?”

And things continue to unravel from there, as we’re shown a Japanese funeral interrupted by out-of-character explosions of grief, the stunted way the husband can’t make eye contact and a bereft mother and wife staggers on in shock, not comforted by a culture not known for its hugging. At all.

Fukada gets caught up in the layers of connection and little revelations that entangle these people in a large web of regret, duplicity and impulse control. But he gives us little feel for the characters and no reason to empathize with them despite all we see them going through.

Truth be told, the tragedy is potentially wrenching, and then all but abandoned.

Several good scenes resonate, and one sublime scene stands out — Taeko’s heartfelt confrontation with the man who ditched her and their son, acted-out in sign language, because Park Shinji is deaf and mute.

But “Love Life” doesn’t coalesce into anything deeper than “Everybody’s dealing with something” and “Life’s a mess that only gets messier.” And in the end, this quiet drama — stumbling into near comedy for the finale — is just pointless enough to pass for “dull.”

Rating: unrated

Cast: Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama, Hirona Yamazaki and Atom Sunada.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kôji Fukada. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time 2:05

Gibson joins Collin Woodell, Nhung Kate, Katie McGrath, Jessica Alain and…Ray McKinnon in this continuation “prequel” of Wickworld and the hotel for assassins.

For those not following the post-“cancellation” Mel Gibson saga, this sort of violent action setting has been his bread and butter in B-and-C movies the past ten years. No, he wasn’t really “canceled.” He’s just an action star aged into grizzled shoot-em-up roles.

This three part series comes to Peacock this Sept.

A tone poem on rural life, community and Black life in the rural South.

A fall feature from our friends at A24.