Movie Nation

“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is so much bubbly, frothy fun that it makes you wonder how “feel good movies” ever got a bad name.

Director Anthony Fabian and a team of co-writers make this glorious, feather-light period piece effortlessly amusing and above all, sweet. The best “feel good” movies do a little something to restore our faith in humanity, and this one does that, time and again.

This sentimental adaptation of Paul Gallico’s oft-filmed novel reminds us that Gallico’s mid-20th pop fiction turned up on screen about as often as Stephen King’s does today — from “Lili” and “Thomasina” to “The Poseidon Adventure.” It makes a grand showcase for Lesley Manville, best known in recent years for playing Princess Margaret in “The Crown,” but a favorite of director Mike Leigh and an Englishwoman who has no trouble playing roughhewn American (“Let Him Go”) when the needs arises.

Mrs. Harris is a simple, widowed cleaning woman who manages a penuriously comfortable life in 1957 London, working for multiple clients — a posh bachelor (Christian McKay), a lord and lady (Anna Chancellor) who won’t pay her on time, and a more-self-absorbed-than-the-rest young actress (Rose Williams).

There’s just enough left over at the end of the week for a night at the pub or even the dog track with her fellow cleaning woman Vi (Ellen Thomas) and the aging, working class Irish lady’s man Archie (Jason Isaacs, adorable).

But there are shadows hanging over this limited life. There’s not a lot of cash on hand for a woman in her 50s and working this hard. It’s a limited life.

Mrs. Harris is “widowed” in that her husband was missing in action in “The War.” She’s superstitious about “My Eddie,” not wanting to do anything to imply she’s given up hope he’ll show up over a dozen years after his disappearance. And she’s always looking for “signs” that Eddie is looking over her.

The day her life changes is the one she spies a new dress the Lady Dant (Chancellor) has purchased for her daughter’s all-important wedding. It’s glorious. It’s from Christian Dior in Paris. And even though this one-percenter can’t pay her employee on time, she had 500 pounds sitting around to purchase a piece of haute couture.

Mrs. Harris swoons. Mrs. Harris has a goal. She must have such a dress. A life of labor and penny-pinching will have its reward. As she doubles up work, takes in sewing and the like, scrimping and saving, she shrugs off every obstacle that gets in her way, and sees every boon as a sign.

“It’s my Eddie, my angel!”

And damned if events and her friends don’t conspire to make sure this unassuming woman’s one, all-consuming dream comes true.

But one first-ever plane ride to Paris later presents a new set of obstacles. Dior’s overlord (Isabelle Huppert, magnificently maleficent) dismisses her with an “I fear you have the wrong address” as a showing for the rich and richer is beginning. A sea of snobs and an officious, rude staff could end this dream right now.

Because it’s not like she can just buy a dress off the rack. But the sight of her rolls of cash wins her one champion — the cash-flow fixated bookkeeper (Lucas Bravo). And a simple act of courtesy by Mrs. Harris has made “the face of Dior,” the model Natasha (Alba Baptista) another fan.

The magnanimous Marquis de Chassagne (Lambert Wilson) insists she sit with him as his guest, and shows her the ropes of such exclusive private showings. Oy, oo’s that over there? Why, Monsieur Dior, my dear woman.

“‘e looks like my milkman!”

Manville keeps the character just this side of Eliza Doolittle, and Fabian (“Skin,” “Louder than Words”) lets the obstacles arrive, one after the other, followed by the working class woman’s plucky work-arounds. There’s delight in this story thanks to just the right proportion of heartaches and heartwarming mini-triumphs.

Much attention is paid to the milieu, with 1957 Paris in the middle of a sanitation workers strike, Dior in dire financial straits and London a lot more integrated than the whitewashed movies of the day let on.

Manville perfectly captures this throwback character, a member of the “Keep calm and carry on” generation inclined to be of service to one and all, but awakened to something of the bum deal the working class has been dealt by the rich as she’s schooled by the striking French.

A little romance, a little match-making, a trip to the Folies Bergere, a first-ever ride on a Vespa, a few fittings as part of bespoke dressmaking and an awful lot of twinkling put the frosting on this cake.

And this cast, from top to bottom, adds to the sense of the effortless charm of it all, so much so that you just know herculean labors must have been involved to make it so.

Not to gush or go too far overboard, but the warmth of a movie like “Mrs. Harris” is downright restorative in the viewing, two escapist hours that remind us that everyone is entitled to courtesy, a fair shake and a little beauty and luxury, and most of all, the hope that life can get better.

Rating: PG

Cast: Leslie Manville, Alba Baptista, Anna Chancellor, Ellen Thomas, Rose Williams, Jason Isaacs, Lucas Bravo, Lambert Wilson, Christian McKay and Isabelle Huppert.

Credits: Directed by Anthony Fabian, scripted by Anthony Fabian, Carroll Cartwright, Keith Thomas and Olivia Hetreed, based on a novel by Paul Gallico. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:55

The DVD cover is much more lascivious than the documentary it contains, or the tepid movie that inspired it, and apparently a generation of South American filmmakers who saw it and thought, “I can do that.”

That’s what the Spanish language “Straight to VHS” is about, a cult film that made a mark far beyond its distribution.

And yes, I have to worry about DVD covers and movie subject matter in terms of donations these days, as Florida’s governor is a book banning homophobe, a Nazi who has found his “Jews” to campaign against.

Can’t have a library get in trouble for renting out material that the local brownshirts will use as an excuse to cut off their funding.

A Spanish Civil War action comedy with nationalist fascists, anti-fascists, Nazis and zombies, “Valley of the Dead” is the epitome of “high concept,” a movie so simple you can sum up its plot and/or potential appeal in a single line.

It leans more towards the “thriller” end of the spectrum, never quite sticking the zombie comedy landings, never getting all it can from combat-thriller-as-zombie-movie tropes and situations.

But you know the old saying. “If you see one Spanish Civil War zombie action comedy this year…”

Miki Esparbé of “Off Course to China” stars as Capt. Jan Lozano, whom we meet trying to wisecrack his way out from in front of a firing squad. Lucky for him his uncle (Manuel Morón, not a typo) is a general.

The perpetual screw-up, a hot-head who head-butted a judge who happened to be Generalissimo Franco’s cousin is given one last chance, a mission to deliver a message to an officer on the other side of a Republican/leftist held valley. “Suicide,” Capt. Jan gripes (in Spanish with English subtitles, or dubbed).

But he’s assigned a virginal, cowardly driver (Manel Llunell) and off they go. Stopping to check on a fascist pilot whom they see shot down is their undoing. A sergeant (Luis Callejo) and his “anarchist”/leftist militia capture them just as they find the pilot’s corpse.

We have mere moments to get acquainted with “the Russian” (Sergio Torrico) in their ranks, the American photographer and the short-haired/short-tempered fighter named “Priest Killer” (Aura Garrido) when damned if that dead pilot isn’t dead after all. It takes more than a few neck-snaps and bullets to figure out that a shot in the skull is the only thing that stops his crawling, ravenous taste for human flesh.

As their militia’s base camp is wiped out, that makes everyone’s mind up for them. The dead are undead in this Spanish valley. Should they cut their fascist prisoners loose and fight a common enemy?

“You can’t die twice if you don’t escape once,” mutters the Russian Brodsky, given to speaking in proverbs. But as they stumble into other straggling survivors of the zombie mini-apocalypse, there’s nothing for it but to team up — the fascist sniper nicknamed “Muslim” (Mouad Ghazouan) and the bomb-throwing anarchist “Matches” (Álvaro Cervantes) among them — to make it out of that valley alive, or at least unbitten.

Some of the dopey stuff plays. The cowardly virginal Decruz picked a side in the civil war based on his love of the pastries the nuns make in his home town. Can’t be fighting for the anti-Catholics, can he? He’d lose his pastries.

“Priest Killer” whispers how she earned that nickname, as if we can’t guess.

The SS officer/doctor in charge of the “experiment” that got out of hand is played by the tallest screen villain (Francisco Reyes) since Richard “Jaws” Kiel retired. That’s kind of what they were going for here, a gory zombie picture with one-liners and towering sight gags.

The only times this “Valley” seems to come together are when it’s playing with classic combat and horror tropes — “experts” in this or that part of the mission, noble sacrifice, the squad breaking up into units of two or three to go off and fight the zombie horde, each in his or her own way.

The zombie swarms are OK, if nothing new, and the head-burst/cranial spray effects are digital and kind of “meh.”

The acting is pretty good, but the screenplay lacks the jokes and sight gags that would make this sing. The entire enterprise feels somewhat flat-footed much of the time. It’s never remotely as scary or visceral as “28 Days Later” or laugh-out-loud funny at the other extreme, “Zombieland.”

Still, one can appreciate the Spanish Civil War setting, with a script that strives to point out that Italians and Germans, Muslim Berbers from Morocco and Americans were all mixed up in Spain’s ugliest hour, either as combatants, financiers or journalists.

It’s a pity co-directors Javier Ruiz Caldera and Alberto de Toro, who collaborated on the Spanish action comedy “Spy Time,” couldn’t find something funnier to do with this. Hunting for thrills or laughs in this “Valley” proves to be futile.

Rating: TV-MA, mucho violencia. Y profanidad.

Cast: Miki Esparbé, Aura Garrido, Luis Callego, Álvaro Cervantes, Manel Llunell, Mouad Ghazouan, Francisco Reyes and María Botto

Credits: Directed by Javier Ruiz Caldera and Alberto de Toro, scripted by Jaime Marques Olarreaga. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

What a tricky, twisted thriller in a minor key “Gone in the Night” turns out to be. Well-cast and toying with a tetchy, testy subtext, its virtues tend to suck the life right out of its shortcomings.

Ostensibly about an older woman (Winona Ryder) looking for the reasons her younger lover (John Gallagher Jr.) ditched her on a weekend getaway in the boondocks, it’s really about generation wars, a parable about Boomers, Gen X and those mouthy punks, Millennials.

Can’t we all just get along?

At its best, it’s a clever riff on competing values systems, lifestyles and agendas, a dance through every nasty thing this generation ever said about that one. Or that other one.

Kat and Max seem mismatched the moment we meet them. She’s a well-preserved 50ish, driving her ancient Volvo wagon into the redwoods. He’s a dozen years younger, switching up the music, prattling on about getting her out of her “comfort zone,” and in the passenger’s seat because “I don’t drive.”

But at least he talked her into this weekend rental, and she’s taken the dare.

“I will let you know when I’ve had enough adventure.”

But there’s another, younger couple already in this cabin in the woods. Al (Owen Teague) is sullen and dismissive. Greta (Brianne Rju, fierce) is everything the world tags Generation Z with — a virtue signaling, “capitalism” and “cis normal” bashing, entitled brat. Greta’s pushy and forward, figuring her youth and minority status entitle her to ageism and a lot of “OK, Boomer” judgement.

But Greta is the one to suggest the apparently double-booked newcomers just stay the night. Greta’s the one to make how-pretty-you-still-look cracks ” to Kat, “quite a catch” digs at Max’s ditziness and “that’s hot” endorsements when she hears how they met.

“I was his teacher.” OK, it was a continuing education class the plants-expert/plant shop owner was teaching on hydroponics. Max was just…interested in growing things hydroponically.

All it takes to bust this couple up is a “couples” board game that crosses a few lines, and Kat going to bed before everybody else. A weeping Al is her next morning clue that impulsive/flaky Max has run off with impulsive/predatory Greta.

The plot concerns Kat’s efforts to get over this by finding out where he/they went, tracking down Greta for answers or a confrontation or something else, she doesn’t know what.

To get those answers, she’ll have to find the renter who rented that house to two different couples the same weekend. Nicolas is played by Dermot Mulroney with a twinkle, a hint of mystery and an obvious age-appropriate interest in this cute stranger with her strange “stake out” stalking obsession over being romantically-wronged.

Casting onetime wild-child Ryder as Kat lends credibility to Kat’s rants about “I don’t need to spend another night in an abandoned warehouse with a bunch of f—–g tweakers! I’ve DONE my time!”

And it’s kind of hilarious when Kat/Ryder has to show up at just such a venue and talk her way past the doorman.

“Are your KIDS in there, or something?”

Tju, of TV’s version of “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” is gloriously mean as Greta, 20something and not cursed with burden of self-reflection but into “very intense ambient noise-core” sound. Or maybe I’m just taking Winona (and Mulroney’s) side in their claps at “20 year-olds playing Nerf darts all day” while the world burns.

“Who IS this woman? What is her DEAL? Does she even realize what she did?”

It will take that “bucket list item” first-ever stake-out, revelations through flashbacks and a not-quite-the-knockout-it-might-have-been finale to sort this mystery out.

It helps that Ryder, Tju, Gallagher, Teague and Mulroney are just as good at personifying generational foibles as they are at delivering the generation gap putdowns.

And director and co-writer Eli Horowitz, a veteran of TV’s “Homecoming,” throws in just enough curveballs to keep us guessing and just enough generational jabs to make the script kind of funny and kind of mean-spirited.

If he gets a handle on how feature films should finish — a common failing of filmmakers making the series TV to cinema leap — he’ll be one to watch.

Rating: R for language throughout and brief bloody images.

Cast: Winona Ryder, Brianne Tju, John Gallagher Jr., Owen Teague and Dermot Mulroney.

Credits: Directed by Eli Horowitz, scripted by Matthew Derby and Eli Horowitz. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:30

I’m sure fans of the character-actor/gourmand Stanley Tucci can be forgiven for starting his new food-and-film memoir by flipping back to the 20th and final chapter to the “news hook” of the book.

He had a mid-COVID battle with cancer, the kind that threatened his ability to speak in that mellifluous, urbane sophisticate’s tongue or taste with that epicurean oenophile’s mouth. Once we’ve reassured ourselves that Tucci is fine and can get back to his ever-in-demand film and TV career, and his “Searching for Italy” via its cuisine for CNN, we can relax and enjoy the hell out of the anecdotes, recipes and breezy charm of “Taste: My Life Through Food.”

Longtime fans picked up on Tucci’s continental tastes long before his many TV chat show appearances and later series (Anyone remember “Through the Grape Vine?” on PBS?) revealed that side of his life.

His breakout film, 1996’s “Big Night,” still taught in acting and film schools as the classic “You want a break? Write and direct your own!” indie film went far too deep into Italian cuisine for that to be an accident.

Tucci recalls how that came about, not just the filmmakers he shadowed and studied under (Alan Rudolph, and Rudolph’s teacher, the great Robert Altman), but the chefs his eventual co-star in “Big Night,” Isabella Rossellini, suggested he visit and also shadow.

Inspired as a struggling young actor by “Babette’s Feast,” which he tucked into at a New York art cinema, recollecting his work as a college years bartender at a famed New York Italian eatery (Alfredo’s), he vowed to make a movie that captured “how a restaurant’s structure mirrored that of the theater. The kitchen was ‘backstage,’ which, during a a lunch or dinner rush, was its own mad biosphere filled with frantic humans barely controlling flames and blades. Simultaneously, the dining room was ‘onstage,’ where some of the same humans, after walking through a swinging door, instantaneously became cool, calm and collected.”

Fine dining, he discovered, was vigorous prep and rehearsal, costume and performance.

“Taste” isn’t a simple, straightforward memoir. Tucci gives us a generous helping of his childhood, enthralled by having his constantly-busy mother all to himself watching “The French Chef with Julia Child” as a boy, his mother commenting on Child’s dishes, tastes and personality as she ironed.

I’ve interviewed Tucci a few times over the years, and the voice you get in person is the one that sparkles off the page here — light, informed, relaxed, a kind and polite man of cultivated refinement, a genuine cosmopolitan at ease with the world and the pleasures his work and off-camera pursuits affords him.

We hear just enough about his family’s Calabrian history, how his grandparents and other relatives escaped Italian poverty to come to America and thrive, bringing their native cuisine with them. There are scores of recipes he inherited from his family included in the book, and a few Stanley Tucci twists on traditional Calabrian this or that, or classic cocktails.

The man likes his food, and his wine and his martinis. That joie de vivre spills onto the pages of this playful book.

“I first visited Cioppino’s (in Vancouver) about twenty years ago when I was making a film for which I was well paid and which no one should ever see.”

Tucci is as self-deprecating about his film work as he is tactful about not naming the dogs on his resume.

He name drops like the grand raconteur he is, charming stories of touring to promote “Julie & Julia” with his regal co-star Meryl Streep, and leading her into a foodie misadventure, whisked to doctor visits by his charming chum Ryan Reynolds, who almost flabbergasted a doctor into removing his chemo-treatment feeding tube — malpractice territory.

Although Tucci goes into some depth about on-set catering and its myriad (national) shortcomings, there isn’t all that much about his career or personal life. We remember that his first wife Kate succumbed to cancer, that he met his literary agent second wife Felicity at her sister Emily Blunt’s marriage to that Krakowski fellow at the Italian villa belonging “to some guy whose name rhymes with ‘George Clooney.'”

But another memoir will have to go into more depth about his college years, struggling New York stage actor era and breakthrough in film. The glories of “Taste” make you want to read such a book.

Long passages of recreated conversations of his childhood or with his own kids about food are almost cute, and take some of the privilege out of what reads like a seriously privileged life. And being one of those eat-most-anything fanatics, some of what he cooks (piglets) or eats on location (Minke whale and puffins in Iceland. PUFFINS!) suggests that he’s a bit too willing to buy a restaurant or chef’s declarations of “sustainable” or “humanely prepared.”

He might have been the biggest Julia Child fan on the set of “Julie & Julia,” although director Nora Ephron could have debated that. Tucci also turns the reader on to Child’s best British rival, the traveling, cooking and prattling on in glorious, off-the-cuff, drink-whilst-one-cooks Keith Floyd, a long gone chef whose TV episodes are immortalized on Youtube.

Tucci’s star-struck reaction to dining with the great Italian icon Marcello Mastroianni as the great man filmed “Pret-a-Porter (Ready to Wear)” for Altman in Paris, his frank and funny F-bomb laced reactions to this or that extraordinary dish from assorted restaurants in Italy, New York, Iceland or Paris, his friendship with chefs who helped him master this or that — roast pig, etc — make for a grandly entertaining read, a celebrity memoir you’ll want to hang onto.

I mean, it’s got recipes. Tons of recipes. Including his own “perfect” martini.

“Garnish with either 1 or three olives (never 2) or a lemon twist.

“Drink it.”

“Become a new person.”

Yes. But maybe not one who eats puffins, dear man.

Taste: My Life Through Food, by Stanley Tucci. Simon & Schuster. 291 pages, $28.

A couple of old friends — one of whom never outgrew their laser tag champions past — are all that stand between Norway and the light-sensitive alien zombies who would infect the country, from fjord to shining fjord, in “Blasted.”

That simple premise takes over an hour to set-up in this leaden, lumpenproletariat loser of an action comedy.

That opening hour introduces our nebbish investment advisor “hero,” gathers up four guys for his bachelor party in the woods — one of whom is a grating, gauche client he wants to land and another a laser tag partner he abandoned ago — and shows us, via a vlogger’s visit, the alien tech presence in Norway’s “Mysterious Lights (UFO) Valley.”

That endless prologue and boredom that comes after the prologue hath not laugh one in it. I kid you not.

The upshot? A cast of not-remotely-colorful “types” is hurled into action against humans taken over by green-glowing alien “juice, and the estranged laser tag team must put aside their maturity gap to save the day. Or not.

Sebastian (Axel Bøyum) just wants to impress a rich, hard-drinking, short-attention-span new client (André Sørum) by inviting him to his mild-mannered bachelor party in Hessdalen Valley, a party he now has to soup up to keep this dude from bailing on him.

Boring pals Audun and Pelle (Mathias Luppichini, Eirik Hallert) won’t be enough to keep Kasper the rich douche distracted. Luckily, unbeknownst to Sebastian, his wife-to-be has invited Peter Pan Syndrome in the flesh, Mikkel (Fredrik Skogsrud) as well. He’s just gonzo enough to enliven things, they and we hope.

Their reunion isn’t funny, Sebastian’s “Boner” nickname isn’t explained, but thank heaven, alien zombies amongst the local yahoos come after them after everybody else in that valley, with only the lads and the very pregnant sheriff (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) to save them.

It’s goofy enough, once it gets going. Or almost goofy enough. Frankly, this film is so slow you have my permission to alter the playback speed Netflix helpfully provides in your lower right hand corner.

There isn’t enough here — one “Hey, Joe Exotic, just chill” (in Norwegian with subtitles, or dubbed into English) — to really make this count as a “comedy.”

The clash between the rich guy with his bespoke one-of-a-kind “Flux Repeater” powered supercar (looks like a Trans Am with extra ground effects) and these “normal” guys isn’t much, the whole “UFO Tours” in the town thing abandoned without anything funny coming from it and the aliens, led by the first scientist “possessed” by them (Evelyn Rasmussen Osazuwa) aren’t made that interesting.

They are, however, the first zombies to know how to shoot back in a paintball fight. And the effects aren’t bad.

“Blasted” is a laser tag fight that ends prematurely because every idiot accidentally points his gun at himself right at the start.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Axel Bøyum, Fredrik Skogsrud, Ingrid Bolsø Berdal, André Sørum, Mathias Luppichini, Eirik Hallert, Rune Temte and Evelyn Rasmussen Osazuwa

Credits: Directed Martin Sofiedal, scripted by Emanuel Nordrum. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55

You don’t need to wait for the next season of “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the future it foretells to get a taste of what the global right wing patriarchy has in mind for women. Plunge into the “honor killing” Islamic present of “AV: The Hunt,” a Turkish thriller that could be set anywhere this primitive practice still takes place.

It’s a bracing, damning indictment of a world where women have no bodily autonomy wrapped in a visceral, on-the-lam chase thriller in which every man our heroine meets is not just an existential threat, but a real one.

From rude, intrusive questions implying “Know your place, woman,” to overt threats, a Brotherhood of Man are in league to oppress, catch, abuse, punish and kill Ayse as she tries to escape the small city she’s fled for the supposed anonymity and cosmopolitanism of Istanbul.

Ayse, given a “Kill Bill” fierceness by Billur Melis Koç, has screwed up. She’s been cheating on her brutish husband with a feckless fireman. Husband Sedat (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) busts in on them. Making matters worse, he’s a cop who goes completely off the deep end at this betrayal. He kills the fireman, and Ayse, injuring herself in the escape, barely gets out of their seedy love nest with her life, if not her clothes.

We don’t get the feeling that Sedat’s psychotic behavior is accepted and even normalized until we see Ayse get a little help from a friend, and hear the same counsel repeated in every desperate phone call to female relatives that she makes.

“We told you this would happen,” in Turkish with English subtitles. “You dug a hole for yourself…You knew this would happen…You have to bear it like everyone else.“

Grabbing cash and car keys from her parents’ house reveals how far this judgment extends. Her own family’s men try to stop her, by any means necessary.

She makes her getaway, the first of many, but her quest seems impossible. A traffic stop or a bus stop, male strangers or relatives, an entire culture is hellbent on taking Ayse out, or aiding Sedat in doing that.

Director and co-writer Emre Kay (“Tales from Kars”) serves up one suspenseful scene after another — Ayse stopped for not having her license on her, an older cop lecturing her, taking her into custody, evading her questions about his over-the-top civil rights violations, Ayse eying his gun, where he put her car keys, where his keys are.

All of which culminates in a literal hunt in a forest, a young woman whose own father and family seem determined to see her dead rather than let her get away with “shaming” them.

The escapes, chases and fights — with fists, headbutts, rocks, knives and guns — are expertly set-up, played-out and concluded. Koç doesn’t just look a bit like Uma Thurman in “Kill Bill.” She could play her sister if she learns how to use a samurai sword.

We’re never allowed to settle back and assume we have this film’s ending figured out. Ayse is in peril, first scene to last, in a film that doesn’t waste a single one of its 86 minutes.

“AV: The Hunt” isn’t overt in its politics, but it’s easy to read them into the movie. The “secular state” isn’t as secular as it once was, and maybe never was to the degree Turkey has long boasted to the world. “Conservative” leaders pandering to “fundamentalists” have seen to that.

If you think “Handmaid’s Tale” is just a futuristic dystopia political pundits are warning you about via the actions of the American and international far right, here’s a slap-in-the-face reminder that it’s not the future. For many women, it’s a hellish present.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Billur Melis Koç, Ahmet Rifat Sungar, Adam Bay, Yagiz Can

Credits: Directed by Emre Akay, scripted by Emre Akay and Deniz Cuylan

Running time: 1:26

A solid, straightforward narrative — heavy on the history, light in melodrama — is the best recommendation for “A Call to Spy,” a true story of World War II and an American woman who joined British agents to do perform espionage in Occupied France.

The life story of Virginia Hall was exciting enough that not much embellishment was needed for this film, which actress Sarah Megan Thomas scripted as a star vehicle for herself. Although it betrays its modest budget in the limited and malnourished action sequences, the low-wattage “star power” and the somewhat polished if faintly flat TV movie production design and pacing, it does justice to its subject, even if it leaves her more colorless than we’d hope.

In 1941, shortly before the debacle/”miracle” of Dunkirk, the Brits set up the Special Operations Executive to train and recruit agents in case France fell. When it did, recruiter/supervisor Vera Atkins (Stana Katic) had women already well into training for the work of infiltrating Franceh, gathering intelligence, setting up networks, paying partisans and arranging or directly carrying out sabotage of the German war machine.

Atkins’ boss, Col. Maurice Buckmaster (Linus Roache) embraced her idea that however dangerous the work, women were “more inconspicuous” than men in the field in France. Virginia Hall, a frustrated member of the U.S. foreign service, limited in promotions because of a wooden leg, was among those Atkins lined up. Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), a Russian-born Indian Muslim already in the service as a radio operator, was another.

We get a glimpse of their training, from “ungentlemanly warfare” (self-defense) to surviving torture, and then they’re off — smuggled into France to help lead the struggle to free Europe from Naziism.

“Yours will be a lonely courage,” they hear as they depart (separately). As Virginia sets up networks and leans on her instincts about who to trust, Noor skips from location to location, her radio set in tow, barely a full step ahead of the Germans and their radio-tracking French collaborators.

Director Lydia Dean Pilcher did “Radium Girls” just before this film, another modest but moving piece of overlooked women’s history. The drama is embedded in the situations here, as Pilcher doesn’t manage more than a scene or two of genuine suspense, despite the terror of this work.

Thomas, who also wrote and and co-starred in “Equity,” scripts herself some juicy scenes — Hall living by her instincts, having to throw her weight around amongst sexist Frenchmen and even more sexist Brits — but rarely makes as much out of them as we’d like. The historical Hall was to the manner born and didn’t suffer slights easily — more smart and tough than plucky. Here we get an adequate performance where something with more heat and flash was called for.

Apte (“The Wedding Guest”) comes closer to the mark in a narrower role, a younger, more timid radio operator barely prepared for what she must deal with and its consequences.

The dialogue is WWII boilerplate — “It doesn’t feel right.” “So we’re acting on feelings, now?”

And although the film hews closely to the historical record, the pace is so sedate one wonders if a brisker production could have carried the story on to the war’s end, as Hall’s exploits were ongoing.

As other films on Hall and the extraordinary women of SOE are still in the planning stages, “A Call to Spy” remains the defining take on their heroics and contributions to the war effort. Let’s hope Netflix picking it up greases the wheels toward a bigger budget, more exciting and more thorough accounting. There’s a mini series in this.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images, language, and smoking

Cast: Sarah Megan Thomas, Radhika Apte, Stana Katic, Rossif Sutherland and Linus Roache.

Credits: Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, scripted by Sarah Megan Thomas. An IFC release on Netflix.

Running time: 2:03

It wasn’t hard to track down a still shot from “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” that captures how bland it is. And I needed that shot to make a point that this endless pop music montage masquerading as a “last summer before college” romance underscores.

It’s the banality of beauty incarnate.

The leads of this screen adaptation of a Jennifer E. Smith book could not be prettier, with singing/songwriting actor Jordan Fisher paired up with Talia Ryder, who gives off a sort of young Jennifer Connolly vibe.

But chemistry? Investment in their acting, interest in them as characters or a couple on the screen? Not so much.

He’s the popular hunk with a band, a thing for karaoke and loads of charisma. She’s the “new” girl who just moved back to the town she was born in, someone who has looked at her parents’ broken marriage and her follow-this-or-that-man from town-to-town mother (Jennifer Robertson) and decided she is not going through any of that.

So Aidan can turn down the charm on their first meeting — a house part — and its aftermath. Clare can see where this is going.

“I’m not looking for a boyfriend.”

No ties in high school. She has Ivy League law in her future, and no distraction or traumatic summer-before-Dartmouth break-up is going to interrupt that.

But he negotiates her into an “OK, for now,” without much friction. That’s a hallmark of this Netflix romance. Even the arguments feel watered down and banal.

They will carry on a half-hearted, musical montage romance through the school year and prove to everyone that they can be adult enough to end things gracefully and move on after that.

“The king and queen of ending things” they are, to their BFFs (Ayo Edebiri for her, Nico Haraga for him) and everybody else. Until, of course, the deadline approaches.

There’s nothing to this Michael Lewen (scripted by Amy Reed) film until well into the Big Night the smitten Aidan has planned for their final date, which he will fill with recreations of their memorable dates and lots of Big Gestures. Perhaps he’ll drop the L-bomb again to see if he can get a rise out of Clare, because she’s avoiding it.

What’s almost worth watching here — and really, this movie has little to offer teens or anybody older than tweens — are the ways Clare intentionally sabotages this romantic fairytale “change her mind” effort on Aidan’s part.

Don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not cute or funny or romantic, just inviting friends in as a buffer, forcing Aidan to change plans again and again to dull the impact and foil what he expects to accomplish on their last night together .

It’s cunning in its thoughtlessness, irritating to him and gives “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” a few “real” moments that show promise, even if the leads can’t deliver the sparks that might set a fire.

Rating: TV-14, young love, teen hijinks.

Cast: Talia Ryder, Jordan Fisher, Ayo Edebiri, Djouliet Amara, Jennifer Robertson and Nico Haraga.

Credits: Directed by Michael Lewen, scripted by Amy Reed, based on the book by Jennifer E. Smith. A Lionsgate film for Netflix

Running time: 1:24

“The Sea Beast” bolts off the screen with a photo-realistic CGI animated shipwreck and a bracing blast of high stakes mayhem as told by a plucky girl, reading a dime novel on sea serpents and those who hunt them — “Tales of Captain Crow” — to her fellow orphans.

Director Chris Williams of “Moana,” “Bolt” and “Big Hero 6,” and his co-writer fold in bits of “Treasure Island,” “Moby Dick” and “Pinocchio” into their tale of that age when the ships were wooden, the crews made of iron and the deep was filled with ship-devouring beasts destined to be hunted to extinction by crews using cannon, pistols and harpoons that they try not to call “harpoons” because we all know what they’re doing in a metaphorical sense — even the kids.

The beasts are a substitute for whales.

It’s not the movie’s abrupt inevitable turn towards “There’s got to be another way” in the age-old struggle between sailors and beasts, nor the gloriously and historically-defensible diverse crew chasing the last of these “beasts” in the “hunting” ship, The Inevitable that kind of lost me. It’s the whole “How to Train Your Dragon” without the laughs that it devolves into that make this Netflix outing something of a yawner.

The action is spectacular, the menace palpable and the “see things from the ‘hunted’ beasts point-of-view” angle touching, in a metaphorical way. But swap out the humorless sailors for funny, Scots-accented Vikings, and even a ten year old will recognize “We’ve SEEN this.”

Jared Harris brings gruff gusto the role of surly Captain Crow, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Sarah, his hyper-competent, tough, no-nonsense first mate.

But danged if the patriarchal skipper hasn’t ordained the foundling sailor and deadliest hunter Jacob (Karl Urban), whom he regards as “like a son” as his replacement on the bridge. First, though, Captain Crow has unfinished business with The Red Bluster, deadliest of the red-tails, one of many species of sea beasts that The Inevitable and its rivals hunt, at the behest of The Royals (“Downton’s” Jim Carter, and Doon Mackichan).

Meanwhile, orphan Maisie (Zaris Angel-Hator) finishes up her latest reading from “Tales of Captain Crow” to her fellow orphans, and makes her latest escape from the ever-so-nice orphanage. Her plan? To find the captain and throw in with his swarthy crew.

She only finds Jacob, on shore leave. And he’s all “A ship is no place for a kid,” which just means she’ll have to stow away to get on board.

Maisie’s efforts to intervene in the ship-vs-beast battle only get her and Jacob swallowed. And that’s how she befriends “Red” and everybody has to change her or his entire worldview.

“Maybe you can be a hero and still be wrong,” is the messaging here.

It’s more adult than you might think, but rarely jarringly-so. Generic, harmless enough and watchable, with a few touching moments — seeing the old harpoons sticking out of the “Dragon”/gecko designed beast — and plenty of violence.

But charm and humor are in shorter supply than you’d hope. There’s barely a funny moment in it, even though there are English-accented attempts at jokes about how often sailors say “Yarrrr,” and a cute baby beast is introduced, right on cue, in the later acts.

It’s better than some Netflix animated fare, but not original or fun enough to be up to the streamer’s gold standards in CGI entertainment for kids — “Klaus” or “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”

Rating: PG, violence and lots of it

Cast: The voices of Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jim Carter, Doon Mackichan, Dan Stevens and Jared Harris.

Credits: Directed by Chris Williams, scripted by Nell Benjamin and Chris Williams. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:55