Movie Nation

Many of us dream of making that “escape to the country,” finding a pastoral piece of rural wherever to get away from it all, get back to the land and experience a little peace.

But what did Sartre warn us? “Hell is other people.” No, he wasn’t talking about Jason Aldean’s idea of “small towns.” But he could’ve been. No matter where you are in the world, that “get away from it all” move is wholly dependent on how friendly or unfriendly the locals are where you move.

Set aside your Hollywood preconceptions about psychological thrillers when you take in “The Beasts” (“As Bestas”), a Spanish tale with a hint of “Straw Dogs” about it, although “Jean de Florette” was an obvious inspiration, above and beyond a true story told in a 2016 documentary.

Director and co-writer Rodrigo Sorogoyen serves up a tense, suspenseful tale of French “outsiders” facing rising intimidation, taunts and worse from hostile locals when they move to a remote mountain village in the north of Spain.

The long opening scene, in the bar in this tiny “ghost town,” introduces bullying blowhard Xan (Luis Zahera), and it quickly becomes obvious why he’s always dominating the conversation over drinks dominoes. If he lets anybody else get in a word edgewise, his intellectual limitations will stand out all the more.

He lords over his simpler brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido) and buries one and all in BS and abuse.

But the guy he really hates is the burly farmer he nicknames “Frenchy.” Antonoine (Denis Ménochet) is a bear of a man who avoids confrontation with this big mouth as he sips his drink. But he can’t even leave in peace. The Francophobic Xan finishes off his dimwitted insults about the French and Spanish history with an “In this country, we say hello” and “goodbye” when entering or leaving a bar (in Spanish, with English subtitles).

Antoine gives the impression he could pound this Okie-lean 50something lout into the tiled floor. But he was a school teacher. He’s just mastered the language. He and his wife run an organic farm and sell their wares at the farmer’s market and at street fairs. They need to get along.

So Antoine takes it.

There’s bad blood, we learn. Wife Olga (Marina Foïs) isn’t all that committed to this place where “We break our backs and empty our savings.” And those Anta brothers aren’t going to leave them in peace and aren’t going to ever accept them, no matter how many abandoned, ruined old houses they restore to livable in a dirt road village where no one else would ever move.

Sorogoyen tells this story of steady, tense escalation with great patience. Antoine can’t get the local cops interested in the various violations the Antas visit upon. So he starts secretly recording them.

The brutish brothers may not be sophisticated, but they know how to mess with a fellow farmer.

And on and on it goes.

When Claude Berri told this sort of story, he made it a two-film saga of ancient grudges coming home to roost — “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring,” two of the great French films of the ’80s.

Sorogoyen boils this saga down to a single story, with subtle twists and steadily rising suspense. You think you’re guessing where it’s going, but you don’t. This may have hints of “Straw Dogs,” but the real world isn’t a Sam Peckinpah movie. This may lean on Berri’s films, but it diverges from those in fascinating ways.

Zahera loses himself in Xan, a fuming jerk who is just smart enough to know that his fury is all he can count on when he’s looking for someone else to blame for his life.

Ménochet gives Antoine a delusional trust in his instincts, in common sense, reason and his ability to read people and especially his trust in Spain’s version of “useless rural cops'” concept of right and wrong.

Foïs keeps Olga’s deepest thoughts secret even if her deepest fears are something she isn’t shy about expressing to her husband.

The scenery, the seasons, even the worn and emptied-out mountain village have a hypnotic beauty in “The Beasts.” But Sorogoyen’s film reminds us that scenery and the nature walks it invites aren’t everything, and that “escape” is illusory. Out in the country, you’re on your own, and you’re at the mercy of other people and other people’s values and limits of how far they’ll go in a feud.

If you don’t know that grudge isn’t going away, and that neither are they, you’re smart as you think.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Marina Foïs, Denis Ménochet, Luis Zahera, Diego Anido and Marie Colomb.

Credits:Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, scripted by Isabel Peña and Rodrigo Sorogoyen . A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:17

Dublin’s North Circular Road isn’t anything the casual tourist might pick up on, even upon glancing at a map when visiting the city. It’s not a North American idea of what such a name might imply — an interstate loop or pre-interstate U.S. highway bypass.

But in Dublin, it’s a dividing line between “downtown,” the historical, touristy part of the city, and the northern suburbs. It’s very old, dating from when British engineers conceived it in the mid-18th century. And it’s historic, a way of telling the story of the city, the people and their struggles and the music they made to preserve that history.

“North Circular” is an elegaic black and white documentary that has singers and assorted locals remember that history through ballads and laments, and who tell of what is here and what used to be here — from Mountjoy Prison and St. Brendan’s asylum in Grangegorman, to long-gone O’Devaney Gardens housing estates, the famed Cobblestone folk club and a football (soccer) pitch where the “Bohs” (Bohemians) face off with their hated rivals, the (Shamrock) Rovers to this day.

Writer-director Luke McManus takes us from Phoenix Park and its monuments all the way east to “the docks,” which terminate the road (more or less) at Dublin Bay.

The music is simple and unadorned with studio refinements — a capella singers, pipers, tin whistle players reviving ancient ballads and more modern tunes recalling the ways the authorities (the Brits) in their historic zeal for “institutionalizing” the Irish, trumped up charges against women to imprison and then ship them to “Van Dieman’s Land” (Australia) because the new British colony “needed women,” other hardships and love stories and history.

“North Circular” is geographically and emotionally evocative, just gorgeous to see, to hear and to immerse yourself in, enveloped in an ancient city’s lore via its music.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Lisa O’Neil, Gemma Dunleavy, John Francis Flynn, Johnny Flynn, Ian Lynch, Eoghan O’Ceannabháin and Séan Ó Túama

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luke McManus. A Lightdox release.

Running time: 1:25

The look is as lurid as black and white cinematography ever got, New York after dark “Photographed,” the title tells us, in a novel way of giving credit, by the great “James Wong Howe.”

The music is jazz at its sleaziest — brassy, brazen, squawking in protest to be heard over the din of the dialogue. And those words pure poetry, straight from pens dipped in poison.

 “I’d hate to take a bite outta you. You’re a cookie full of arsenic.”

“Mr. Falco, let it be said at once, is a man of 40 faces, not one. None too pretty, and all deceptive.”

And then there’s the best dismissal in the history of the movies — “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried.”

Maybe “Sweet Smell of Success” isn’t Hollywood’s highfalutin version of Shakespeare in 1950s New York. It’s more Moliere — cruel, quippy, lacerating with characters as venal as any the screen ever served up, one and all as mean as hell, and quotable in the bargain.

“Stop tinkering pal, that horseradish won’t jump a fence.” “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

Based on a novella by famed screenwriter Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest,” “Sabrina”), it was turned into purple-in-the-face prose — 1950s Broadway-ese — by Lehman and revolutionary playwright Clifford Odets (“Waiting for Lefty,” “Golden Boy,” “The Country Girl”).

“Match me, Sidney.” “Come back, Sidney! I wanna chastise you!”

Lehman, a former assistant to a columnist and press agent, ensured that “Success” is a sizzling Cabaret Life portrait of Manhattan when it sizzled, when Broadway/showbiz newspaper gossips like Walter Winchell, Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons and Dorthy Kilgallen published daily accounts of who was stepping out with whom, was at this play or that concert, dining at The Stork Club or tying one on at Toots Shor’s.

Ethically slippery, morally amoral, these high-and-mighties would sit in said nightclubs at their own booth and have singers, comics, actors, politicians and boot-lickers pay homage and fealty and hope to get noticed and “in the column.”

And lot of this intel and club owner promotion and bon mots attributed to the famous and want-to-be-famous was served up to those columnists as “tips” from press agents. If the columnists were “monsters,” willing to do anything for a scoop, to build this unknown up or knock that famous personage down, press agents were the monsters’ minions, paid to “place” attention-garnering tidbits in the columns by clients who hoped that it’d lead to a bigger crowd, a better gig or a new role.

“It’s a dirty job,” one disgruntled comic grips,” but I pay clean money for it.”

Tony Curtis, in one of his finest performances, plays nervous, nail-biting eager-beaver press agent Sidney Falco, a guy with an office that has his bedroom right behind it, handy for a night owl prowling the clubs for clients and working the phones and the club booths to get something “in the column.”

Sidney’s “so pretty” that you’d think he was a star. But he’s a hustler on the margins. He skips wearing a hat and coat out to save “tips” to every hat-check in every club that’s part of his rounds. Sidney needs the attention of a “monster” he calls his “friend,” J.J. Hunesecker.

Burt Lancaster, the ostensible lead and producer of this film, gets a real “star entrance” over 20 minutes into the picture, photographed from below, his glasses adding a sinister shadow to his eyes, his voice a pitiless, unfiltered insult of brusque dismissal. Senator or showgirl or groveling Sidney, J.J. makes no distinction.

“I love this dirty town,” he growls. It’s people he’s not crazy about.

But his MUCH younger sister (Susan Harrison), 19 and living in his big apartment, has taken up with the guitarist (Martin Milner) of The Chico Hamilton Quintet. And J.J. isn’t having it. Sidney’s been given the task of busting them up, and he’s failing.

“Sweet Smell of Success” is about what Sidney will do for the all-powerful/grudge-holding J.J. to bust up this “innocent” girl and this jazz man of “integrity, and what it will cost everybody involved.

The great Scottish director Alexander MacKendrick keeps the picture on the move and the banter, monologues and debates push it towards a sprint at times, with the legendary cinematographer Howe empashizing the darkness of the street scenes and shadowy tight-quarters of the clubs, with every conversation rendered more violent by the close-ups and dense compositions.

You don’t have to meet the dirty cops, get lectured on the unsavory connection between “lying” press agents and compromised columnists to smell and feel the corruption.

Curtis and Lancaster set off sparks, and all by himself Curtis keeps a bright sheen on smiling and backbiting Sidney, who always finds new depths of sleazy, self-serving narcissism to get him closer to his goal, a life of ease and being “Somebody.”

Pimping out that cigarette girl (Barbara Nichols) and regular booty call? He doesn’t give it a second thought.

“Sweet Smell of Success” sounds as modern as a 1950s drama can while still being very much a time capsule — newspapers and typwriters and cigarettes and “high balls” at “my regular table” where a phone is brought each time someone who knows how to reach J.J. or Sidney makes a call.

MacKendrick is best known for his classic British (Ealing) comedies “The Man in the White Suit” and “The Ladykillers.” Delightful as they are, this American outing his has to be his best film.

Lancster and Lehman and Burt’s producing partner James Hill knew what they were doing when they enticed MacKendrick and DP Howe, Lehman and Odets and Curtis and The Chico Hamilton Quintet into taking this on, and talked club owners into letting them into the legendary locations that this masterpiece preserved forever on film.

There never was a better portrait of “this dirty town” in this, one of its many gilded ages, than the movie that gives us just a whiff of the “Sweet Smell of Success.”

Rating: approved

Cast: Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, David White, Emile Meyer, Edith Atwater, Martin Milner and The Chico Hamilton Quintet.

Credits: Directed by Alexander MacKendrick, script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets, based on the novella by Lehman. An MGM/United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube. etc. .

Running time: 1:36

Writer-director Greg Pritikin’s “The Mistress” is a slick and servicable if somewhat unsurprising thriller about traumas newlyweds unearth and unleash when they move into a gorgeous old Queen Anne house in LA’s Angelino Heights corner of Echo Park.

Pritikin apparently based the film, which he wrote and directed, on the history of his own Angelino Heights home, which served as the movie’s primary location. It makes a properly baroque and eccentric setting for a paranoid tale with stalker/supernatural touches.

Parker (John Magaro), a writer, and costume designer Maddie (Chasten Harmon of TV’s “The Good Fight” and “Elementary”) don’t get bad vibes from the Victorian era house the moment they move in. Well, aside from their pushy, over-sharing and sexy neighbor Dawn (Kat Cunning).

But weird things start happening, and Parker’s the first to pick up on it. As his new bride is a tad rattled by any hint of “haunted,” he keeps “incidents” to himself — the swing that’s swinging by itself, the visions of violence that might have happened here.

As these begin right about the time he finds an ancient glass-plate camera, complete with a preserved, undeveloped negative of a woman who used to live there, and a cache of 100 year old love letters from a “Rebecca” to her lover turn up, Parker is just the first to wonder if it’s her (Aylya Marzolf) who is sneaking in and sneaking around.

Because it’s not their on-the-make neighbor, is it? Or could it be this ex that Parker took out a restraining order on?

Thrillers like this get by on their jolts — which here are modest — and their clues and how easy or tricky they are to figure out. Those are…pretty obvious.

Magaro, recently seen in the sublime “Past Lives” and in “Showing Up,” manages a bit of the mania we’d expect from someone confronting the supernatural, or merely hoping his new wife doesn’t freak out about the various unpleasant possibilities as to what’s going on.

Harmon’s got less to work with as a character but plays panicked and irked well.

There’s a bit of suspense, especially in the bang-up finale. And if the plot’s unraveling isn’t all it needed to be, that’s how we wind up with “servicable.”

And at least one can say to Pritikin, who previously did the wheezing Netflix AARP comedy “The Last Laugh,” “Hey, nice house.”

Rating: R, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Johyn Magaro, Chasten Harmon, Kat Cunning and Aylya Marzolf

Credits:Scripted and directed by Greg Pritikin. A Blue Sky release.

Running time: 1:45

Let’s get the words “ragtag team” and “feel-good” and “uplifting” out right at the beginning of a dissection of the Korean soccer comedy, “Dream.” Because you know if it’s an underdog sports comedy, all of those words apply, at least in intent.

It’s about homelessness, a problem everywhere, even in places that try to pretend it isn’t (Florida, where I live, has the third highest homeless population in America, with a government more interested in covering that up for the dictatorial governor than addressing it). And it’s about Homeless World Cup of soccer, and yes that’s a real thing.

This story of homeless people, how they live and how they became homeless in Korea is saddled to a boilerplate plucky “ragtag team” “feel-good” sports comedy, a formula older than “The Bad News Bears,” malleable enough to apply to any sport — hockey (“The Mighty Ducks”), American soccer (“Kicking & Screaming,” The Big Green”), British (“Mean Machine”) or Spanish futbol (“Holy Goalie”).

It’s a simple, formulaic comedy with cute bits and funny characters, a quarrelsome male-female relationship and uplifting messaging, enough to fit in a passable 75 minute film. This being Netflix, the damned thing staggers around for 125 minutes instead.

Yoon Hong-dae, played by singer/actor/variety show host Park Seo-joon, is a troubled second division soccer player for Korea’s Red Champions team. He’s something of a star, but hounded at press conferences because of the fact that his scammer mother is on the lam.

He has a very Korean sort of meltdown on the pitch — not demonstative, just self-destructive as far as play goes — gets abused by the press one more time and pokes some nagging reporter who just “had my eyes done” in those “fixed” eyes, and becomes internet infamous.

His management team figures his career in football is over. “Looks are your real talent,” so maybe a record deal, a variety show hosting gig or a spot in a reality (“Survivor” ish) series is in order, they suggest.

First, though, they need “a rehab project” that could get him established in the entertainment industry — a public appearance with a hint of humility and atoning for his sins about it.

Young documentary filmmaker Lee So Min (Ji-eun Lee) is summoned, as she’s working on a TV doc about Korea’s Homeless World Cup team. Yoon Hong-dae can take over as “volunteer” coach, show a little selflessness and lead Korea’s street people to victory over the world’s best homeless teams at the World Cup in Budapest.

Yoon isn’t having it. Yoon won’t agree. Yoon is then seriously put-out when he takes the gig and the tee-hee-hee pixie filming him keeps making him do retakes, with suggestions and the like to heighten “the reality” of this non-fiction film.

“What kind of documentary is scripted?” he gripes, in Korean with subtitles, or dubbed.

“The kind with plot twists!”

She films back-stories of the players, who are “cast” in “try-outs” that have as much to do with their “story” as their soccer talent.

Somehow, Yoon is supposed to turn some troubled, mostly older and often on-the-spectrum men into athletes and competent soccer players, travel with them to Budapest and conjure up a happy ending for Lee So Min’s movie.

“Dream” is a filled with training session and soccer match montages and brief back-stories about the players — this one has a daughter about to move to Australia with his ex-wife’s new family, that one has a mentally ill woman depending on him, another is hunting for a “missing” long-lost love.

Where the sparks might come in is in the relationship between the cute, girlish filmmaker and the cynical footballer, who is prone to flipping her off for being a nuisance.

Yes, everyone’s playing a “type,” but my favorite moment comes when Lee So Min lets down her deferrential, tittering Korean “girl” mask and lays it on the line.

“I’m finding it harder to keep smiling the older I get,” she admits, before throwing a few hard truths at Mr. Who Does He Think He Is, “a K-Pop star?”

That’s where this movie could have gone, an edgy “meet mean and cute” relationship that cuts through cultural niceties and gets down to brass tacks, as we say here in soccer purgatory, the U.S.

The cynicism of the “real” documentary and of personal management team’s “K-Pop/Reality TV or chat show host” “handling” of Yoon is potentially hilarious. Yes, his one asset if he quits playing is his looks. They’re bankable fame in much of the world, especially in Korea.

But the picture bogs down in showing us Yoon forced to help this player or that one make enough money selling magazines on the subway to be able to take a break and play and lots of game footage, the effort it takes for him to be a “nice guy.”

A better performance might have sold those scenes. Our leading man isn’t convincingly mean.

There are “Shaolin Soccer” level rough matches, with cheating and tripping and baiting and the like, injuries even. No, they’re not all that intersting aside from the up-close violence and occasional well-choreographed, filmed and edited “play.”

And the film-within-a-film element is blown from the get-go, with Lee So Min not capturing “the good footage” even though she’s there to witness this fight, that bit of humanity. Ji-eun Lee doesn’t play the “instinct” TV news and documentary film photographers have to raise the camera to her face the instant something interesting might happen.

Many oof these problems could have been addressed with a script that hunts for fun off the pitch and ruthless editing that eliminates the endless dead stretches that make this “Dream” something of a nightmare.

Rating: TV-14, violence, vulgar gestures

Cast: Park Seo-joon, Ji-eun Lee

Credits: Directed by Byeong-heon Lee, scripted by Mohammed Abdullah and Byeong-heon Lee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:06

Oh to be a tweenage girl with access to Disney+ this weekend.

“The Slumber Party” is a brisk, breezy and often-amusing riff on that old fashioned teen and pre-teen ritual, the last sleepover of summer. Well-cast, with some properly snarky one-liners and a lot of creativity shown in making this young-kid-appropriate, it’s a cute variation of an “I don’t remember last night” comedy built for kids too young to drink.

I mean, you’ve got to make our narrator, Megan (Darby Camp), her besties Paige (Emmy Liu-Wang) and Anna Maria (Valentina Herrera) and Valentina’s dorky soon-to-be-stepsister Veronica (Alex Cooper Cohen) “forget” everything that happened the night of Anna Maria’s birthday sleepover.

Screwy Veronica’s way of ingratiating herself with the daughter of the man her mom is about to marry? Hire a hypnotist for Anna Maria’s birthday. He puts them under and waking up with a bloody nose, wearing the hoodie of a guy one girl crushes on, hearing a tub full of baby ducklings, seeing a “pooh painting” on the wall (“It’s Ok. It’s NUTELLA!”), one missing an eyebrow and one 14 year-old MIA, these ladies have questions — lots of them.

If only they can track down the missing Anna Maria, who is very upset at her father remarrying. If only they can get that pooh– Ok, “NUTELLA” — off the walls. If only they can track that danged Magnificent Mesmer down so that he’ll give them the “trigger word” that lets them remember their night of being “your most authentic selves.”

Did I mention that the flamboyantly funny Tituss Burgess of “The Unsinkable Kimmy Schmidt” is “Mesmer,” if not exactly “Magnificent?”

“Look kid, let me in or I’ll use my magic to make you grow a mustache that your Mom won’t let you bleach!”

Yeah, THAT Tituss Burgess.

The three girls hunt for their missing fourth for a hectic day of breaking into school, Veronica falling hopelessly in love with Paige’s prankster/hustler older brother (Dallas Liu) because it turns out both of them are nuts about “High School Musical,” getting trapped in the “Onion Munch” onion-eating contest at the Chattahoochee Onion Festival and remembering stealing a rival high school’s hedgehog parade float.

The one-liners come pretty fast in this Eydie Faye script. Megan swoons over dreamboat Jake (Ramon Jose Rodriguez) and his “toothpaste commercial teeth,” and laments how she may never like to “try new things” with good reason, taking a shot at a (non-Disney) local theme park.

“Does ANYbody truly ENJOY being at Six Flags?”

Megan tried lots of new things, as did everybody else. Otherwise, why are there ducklings from the school science lab filling Anna Maria’s basement tub?

“What the DUCK?”

Smart-mouthed Paige has put-downs handy for every occasion. That trash-talking good’ol boy at the “Onion Munch?”

“I’m sorry, did somebody say ‘BEETLEJUICE’ three times?”

If there are film execs in Burbank with senses of humor, there’s probably some grumbling about how this Atlanta-set low-budget made-for-streaming comedy could be funnier and more of a romp than the big budget/name cast “Haunted Mansion” opening in theaters this weekend.

It’s 40 minutes shorter, for starters. It just flies by. AndTituss Burgess makes EVERYthing funnier.

I won’t oversell this, but a climactic chase in an out-of-control hedgehog float pretty much pegs the middle-school mirth meter, and that’s the target audience here. “Slumber Party” is for kids wanting to see a girl-bonding movie about slightly older kids learning to handle a scary new and bigger school “like Taylor Swift.”

‘Shake if Off.”

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Darby Camp, Emmy Liu-Wang, Valentina Herrera, Alex Cooper Cohen, Dallas Liu, Ramon Jose Rodriguez and Tituss Burgess

Credits: Directed by Veronica Rodriguez, scripted by Eydie Faye. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:22

Fans of the famed Disney “Haunted Mansion” will pick up on all sorts of easter eggs and visual nods to the theme park attraction — sets, gimmicks, props, etc. — in the new film based on a beloved piece of Disneyana.

The rest of us will be the ones who notice how generally fright-free it is, how thin the laughs are and how too much of its two-hours-plus runtime is a bit of a letdown.

It begins with great promise, a spooky tale built around a non-believer (LaKeith Stanfield) and “ghost tour” guide in “the most haunted city in the world,” New Orleans. And then it leaves New Orleans for a remote antebellum mansion/set-piece filled with theme park cutesiness and mostly undistinguished and indistinguishable ghosts. The picture promptly loses its mojo.

Stanfield, of “Get Out” and “Judas and the Black Messiah,” is Ben, a sad and solitary loner who’s crawled into the bottle after losing a loved one. We get a glimpse of the charming love-affair in the prologue and can guess what happened after that.

Now, this one-time man-of-science wakes up late enough in the day to lead people around “haunted” New Orleans. But no matter what his shtick to the tourists, he’s not changed his mind about the subject.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

A visit from a dapper priest (Owen Wilson, in hat and gloves) lures Ben with some ghost-hunting gear to Gracey Manor, where a single mom (Rosario Dawson) and her little boy (Chase W. Dillon) are at their wits’ end. Some presence or presences are conspiring to chase them out of their new home.

An exorcism won’t do. They need a ghost buster. Ben isn’t shy about taking their money, no matter how foolish he thinks they are. A few encounters and one “spectral photograph” later, and he’s starting to believe.

A local “cut-rate psychic” (Tiffany Haddish) is hired. An expert on the ghostly history of the mansion (Danny DeVito) will be consulted as they seek answers and solutions to this mad infestation of the dead-but-not-gone. And a long-dead psychic (Jamie Lee Curtis) will be summoned.

“We’re called MEDIUMs.”

Stanfield throws himself into this, even though he’s nobody’s idea of naturally funny. Ben is here to be the straight-man/skeptic, underreacting to what other folks are seeing or saying they’re seeing until he starts seeing things himself.

“I probably just need to calm down, don’t I?” Dawson’s Gabbie gripes, as well she should.

Haddish, Wilson and even DeVito are strangely subdued, muzzled perhaps by a screenplay (by Katie Dippold) that is mostly filler between digital spooky effects, which aren’t all that spooky.

“Zillow” and “Yelp! score” jokes are the humorous order of the day. “Parks and Rec” veteran Dippold wrote the female “Ghostbusters” and the Goldie/Amy Schumer flop “Snatched.” So…

Even the flashbacks to the mansion’s violent past (not slavery) fail to make much of a connection in the stalled middle acts.

Eddie Murphy’s “The Haunted Mansion” was more childish, broader and goofier, but having a famous comic at the heart of the cast makes a difference in that regard as jokes and gags are kicked up a notch. The scary stuff can’t be amped up to “horror” standards because this is a kids’ film, and “harmless” is always your default mode for those.

But “harmless” is a hard sell to hang on a two hour comedy with too-few laughs and a scary movie with no edgy frights. Still, fans of the various Disney Haunted Mansions around the world may get something out of it, even if nobody can tell the spooky digital ghost-in-chief is Oscar winner Jared Leto.

Rating: PG-13 (Scary Action|Some Thematic Elements)

Cast: LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Danny DeVito, Chase W. Dillon, Jared Leto and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Credits: Directed by Justin Simien, scripted by Katie Dipold. A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:02

The great character actor Ron Perlman has his best big screen role in many years in “The Baker,” a thoroughly satisfying two-fisted B-movie carved out of classics of the genre and carried on the broad, brooding shoulders of “The Perl.”

I must use the phrase “B-movie” thirty times a month in reviews, rarely disparagingly but often in disappointment. Lots of filmmakers try their hand at straight-no-chaser genre pics, and fail. Let The Perl and director Jonathan Sobol, writers Paolo Mancini and Thomas Michael and their canny producers show you how it’s done.

Keep it simple. There are other films built on the unwilling but tough-as-nails care-giver forced to protect a mob-wanted child. But to do it right, lean on John Cassevettes’ “Gloria,” with Gena Rowlands, and Luc Besson’s “The Professional,” with hit-man Jean Reno keeping tween Natalie Portman safe.

Cast with older character actors with modest quotes, bumping them up to leads. If possible, hire somebody beloved. Perlman, the only “Hellboy” or “Son(s) of Anarchy” that matters, fills that bill.

Hustle up incentive money to film it somewhere unusual. We’re never told the location of “The Baker” and his bakery, but it was filmed in the Cayman Islands.

As The Perl might put it, “Who wouldn’t like a working vacation in the f—–g Cayman Islands?”

The story — a solitary baker tends to his shop, methodically bakes his bread and seems to have few customers to interrupt his solitude. Then his sketchy, estranged son (Joel David Moore of the “Avatar” movies) shows up, out of the blue, takes a call about this “bag” he’s got in his car and abruptly ditches his ever-silent eight-year-old (Emma Ho of TV’s “The Expanse”) with the old man he hardly knows.

“I’ll be back before you guys can form a lasting bond!”

Delphi, the kid, won’t talk. She won’t stop raiding the baked inventory. She steals. She won’t follow instructions. She stares at her unknown grandpa as he does a bit of welding (!?).

“What, you wanna be blind as well as mute?”

He offers her goggles. She keeps them. She’s going to need them.

Because limo-driver dad witnessed a drug smuggling ambush. He’s got the packets they call “pink.” And the guy they belong to (Harvey Keitel) wants them back. His lieutenant (Elias Koteas) wastes no time in finding Delphi’s dad, Pete.

“You know why I’m here?” Pete shakes his head. “And yet, here I am.”

Pete gets to make a call to save himself, but he makes it a warning to Delphi and his father. She can’t eat peanuts. She likes green grapes. She wants a treehouse.

Now grandpa’s got to do what he did before he was a baker to find his son. He sleuthes, he asks around, he puts it together. And when the need arises, he tells the granddaughter to listen to music through her earbuds and pull those dark goggles over her eyes.

“Some things might happen,” he growls. “Some things you don’t wanna see.”

The script is packed with spare, pithy lines like that. And the movie is all about Perlman, lumbering into a club, an addicts’ shooting gallery, a public bathroom or dry cleaners, wherever bad men can be found.

Vincent Bouillon did the fight choreography and plays to Perlman’s strengths. The brawls are epic and more or less believable in that old-man-of-violence using his muscles and muscle memory to kick ass and leave no witnesses.

Koteas is given interesting shades to bring to his hired killer, a man whose own boss might cause him to have pangs of conscience.

Keitel brings the impatience and the irritation to a hoodlum who focuses on one wrong at a time, determined to get what’s his and get even with those who wronged him.

The kid sells the “cute” in scenes where Delphi tries to share her sundae with this strange grandpa she’s trapped with, her shifty eyes setting the stage for her next act of pilfering or shoplifting. Grandpa spies her stealing the money left for a diner check.

“Lunch is on you,” the old man growls. “I know you’re good for it.”

There’s a little here that I didn’t buy into, but none of that comes from the performances, the tight direction or the hardboiled dialogue. The plot has moments where you can feel an over-reach coming on.

But “The Baker” delivers on all the promise of its premise, all the salesmanship it took to get it cast, financed and filmed in the lovely Caymans.

You want to make a signature, possible break-out B-movie? See or stream the latest from the The Perl and the guy who directed “The Art of the Steal.” Save that film school money. This is how it’s done.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Ron Perlman, Elias Koteas, Emma Ho, Joel David Moore and Harvey Keitel.

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Sobol, scriped by Paolo Mancini and Thomas Michael. A Falling Forward release.

Running time: 1:44

“Love Tactics” was a Turkish rom-com that borrowed from a lot of Hollywood films of the “Failure to Launch” variety for a showcase of some of the most beautiful actors in Turkish cinema.

You know the drill — the guy “plays games,” and plots his strategy for winning-over or brushing off or hitting it and quitting it with one particular woman with his bros, while she is counter-scheming her own agenda with her besties.

“Love Tactics 2” (“Ask Taktikleri 2”) changes directors, brings back the gorgeous leads and fleshes out the supporting cast with even more gorgeous players largely unknown in the West.

To which we say, “We approve.” Because we do.

Like the first film, it’s a sexy look at a glossy, affluent and urban Turkey of high fashion, social climbing and liberated women. But like “Love Tactics,” it has a hard time finding much that’s cute, new and surprising in such a tale.

We catch up with fashionista Asli (Demet Özdemir) as she’s adjusting and altering the wedding dress of bestie Cansu (Deniz Baydar) and ranting away about marriage mania, old cultural traditions and the nagging that starts “after you turn 16” in her part of the world.

“WHEN are you getting married?” Better hurry up. Don’t turn THIS or THAT candidate down.

“You don’t want to end up alone, with eleven cats!” (in Turkish with subtitles, or dubbed).

Her “Love Tactics” beau Kerem (Sükrü Özyildiz) is dressing the groom, Tuna (Atakan Çelik) amidst a similar diatribe.

“THIS, my friends,” he barks, pointing at the ring, “IMPRISONS us!”

But the moment Asli doubles down on her doubts about marriage to Kerem, she is put-out that he agrees. “It should be MY decision” whether they take things to the altar, she figures.

So she and her besties scheme (it’s all Asli, as Cansu and Ezgi –– Hande Yilmaz — just gawk and listen) a way to change Kerem’s mind to that at least the ball’s in her court. Meanwhile, he counter-strategizes with his bros Tuna and Emir (Bora Akkas), each of them trying to set the agenda without losing this ideal love match they’re already in.

The stakes are stupidly low, which means the situations each conjures up have to be outrageous for the comedy part of this rom-com to work.

There’s an impromptu meeting with her parents — Dad’s (Kerem Atabeyoglu) going through andropause and is riding a new motorcycle and dropping the word “bro” into conversations. Yes, his wife/Asli’s mom is ready for a divorce.

Kerem arranges a sight-seeing flight to scare the “marriage” thing out of fear-of-flying Asli. The puddle-jumper pilot is new to the job and wants one or more of her anxiety pills.

She borrows the baby of a friend of a friend to “show Kerem how good a mother I’d be” and Kerem just figures out how revolting a diapered little boy can be.

And so on.

New franchise director Recai Karagöz, who has some experience in the genre (“My Name is Farah”) can’t get anything more out of these characters and this situation than his predecessor.

It’s a little lighter than “Love Tactics,” if I can trust my memory. But I can’t, because the original was slick and shiny but instantly forgettable, just as one suspects this one will turn out to be.

Rating: TV-14, hot and heavy makeout scenes, a bit of skin

Cast: Demet Özdemir, Sükrü Özyildiz, Deniz Baydar, Hande Yilmaz,
Bora Akkas, Atakan Çelik, Melisa Döngel, Ceyhun Mengiroglu and Kerem Atabeyoglu.

Credits: Directed by Recai Karagöz scripted by Pelin Karamehmetoglu. A Netflix release.

Running time:

A D-Day veteran and “90 year old coffin dodger” leaves his nursing home and great love for a trip to Normandy to pay tribute to fallen comrades.

A true story — you might remember this sidebar inspired from when President Obama made a trip to France to commemorate the D-Day 70th anniversary — the film is a final bow by the Great Glenda, and features Sir Michael, tugging at the heartstrings.

Two Oscar winners, two legends.

Oct. release in the UK, hopefully coming to The New World shortly thereafter.