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The gold standard for spy thrillers isn’t Sir Ian’s Fantastical Mr. Bond, James Bond. That label belongs to the gritty, patient and “real world/real consequences” human-assets spycraft as depicted in the novels of John LeCarre of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Russia House,” “Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” etc., screen adaptations so distinct and numerous as to constitute their own genre.

My favorite work of his is one that new film “All the Old Knives” resembles. “Smiley’s People,” built around LeCarre’s alter ego, the British plodder George Smiley, was turned into a TV series that emphasizes what the book is all about.

It’s just this old office drone, summoned back to “The Circus” (MI-6) to set one last trap that might “turn” his nemesis, code-named Karla. The miniseries is just Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley, a blank-faced fussbudget, tracking down old colleagues and gently prodding their memories with deliberate, probing questions, never giving away the game, always circling around this or that subject over and over again, always asking for just a hint more.

So anybody expecting Chris Pine to show off gunplay and other bits of derring do as CIA spook Henry Pelham in “Knives” is sure to be disappointed. But for those who like memory games, mental traps and trip-ups, “moles,” red herrings and genuine suspects, it’s a rare treat.

Pelham has been summoned by his old Vienna Station chief (Laurence Fishburne) to get to the bottom of something we’ve seen in the films opening. There was a hijacking at Vienna airport that ended badly. No one came out alive, and no intelligence service personnel came out of it looking good.

Years have passed, and one of the hijackings planners has been captured. He says there was an inside-station source that helped the hijackers and this adds yet more shame to this major intelligence failure.

“We can’t afford the embarrassment of a prosecution,” the boss declares. Pelham must go over the list of suspects, all of whom he has history with. He must eliminate the guy who committed suicide and grill the retiree in London (Jonathan Pryce), looking for inconsistencies in his story.

And he must face a former lover because “I’ll know if she’s lying” when he “interviews her.”

Thandiwe Newton is Celia, happily married and settled in tony Carmel-by-the-Sea. But eight years before, she was on station and deep into a relationship with Henry, who had recently arrived from Moscow Station.

Henry’s London and Carmel interviews — friendly and fraught — are intercut with snippets of that horrible hijacking, scenes inside the plane with its terrified passengers and inside Vienna Station, where meetings, theories and solutions are discussed and where staff duck out to check “sources” in person or by phone.

Something that went down that day will give away the culprit.

Director Janus Metz (“Armadillo,” “Borgs vs. McEnroe”) and screenwriter Olen Steinhauer, adapting his own novel, lean into a conceit of movies of this genre — “total recall.” Celia’s memories of that day long ago are detailed, almost beyond belief. So are the more defensive recollections of her mentor, Bill (Pryce).

Pine’s Henry goes easy and he goes hard. There’s sentiment involved, fragile memories of an affair that ended in the aftermath of the hijacking debacle.

He compliments Celia. “You got out clean,” meaning from the Agency. “No one got out clean after (flight) 127,” she confesses.

The leads serve up their best poker faces when we and perhaps they know the stakes, with that whole “embarrassment of a prosecution” proviso suggesting whatever is determined, this will be resolved right now.

Newton’s having a grand run in her career’s second act, and she brings pathos to this situation, a great love from her past who is here not to just catch-up, but accuse her of treason. She brings heart to Pine’s performance as well. Stripped of the action hero requirements that dominate his career, here he’s just a guy upset at what he might know or find out about this great love from his past. She makes that “one you don’t get over” credible.

There’s an inevitability to such movies, an expectation that expectations will be tripped up, and “All the Old Knives” manages those third act twists with skill, if not sizzle.

But for a movie built on probing conversations, details and relationships, it’s pretty good. Not in the LeCarre class, but imitation is the sincerest form of spycraft flattery.

Rating: R for sexuality/nudity, violence and language.

Cast: Chris Pine, Thandiwe Newton, Laurence Fishburne and Jonathan Pryce.

Credits: Directed by Janus Metz, scripted by Olen Steinhauer, based his novel. An Amazon Studios release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:41

You don’t have to be a big fan of “Fiddler on the Roof” to get a kick out of “Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen,” the warm and lighthearted documentary remembrance of this 1971 film. But if you see this “making of” film, it might change your mind about this Broadway blockbuster and the effort it took to bring it to the big screen.

“Journey” is a celebration of not just the two icons of the cinema most famous for realizing this adaptation, the celebrated director Norman Jewison and legendary screen music composer John Williams. It highlights the cinematographic canniness of Oswald Morris, the director of photography, and the uncanny skills of production designer Robert F. Boyle in “recreating the lost world of East European Jewry.”

Director Daniel Raim (“Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story”) finds all these ways to charm and delight us, by having the three little-known actresses who played some of Tevye’s daughters — Rosalind Harris, Neva Small and Michele Marsh — remember this landmark part of their lives, still able to sing their numbers from the show on camera. For good measure, here’s Broadway lyricist Sheldon Harnick singing “Sunrise, Sunset” and joshing “What, you’re not crying?” to the film crew visiting him at home.

Blending fresh interviews with all of those mentioned, along with archival chats with the film’s Israeli star, Topol and on-the-set footage of Jewison, working with his director of photography and directing his big, village-sized cast, Raim recreates the world “Fiddler” was made in through the memories of those who made it. “Journey” gives us the thinking behind the production and the era — “West Side Story” to “Jesus Christ Superstar,” with the biggest hit of them all, “The Sound of Music” — that gave birth to this iconic film.

They had to go to Yugoslavia to build a convincing end of the 19th century Russian shtetl, and let the brown earth, unpainted buildings and photographs by photo-documentarian Roman Vishniac determine the “real” look of such a place in such a time that Boyle would recreate, right down to building the first wooden Jewish synagogue — as a set — seen in Eastern Europe since the Holocaust, conjuring up “an Old World relic of quiet grandeur.”

Williams recalls walking the Lekenik (then Yugoslavia) sets, timing out steps as musical beats to make the Jerry Bock stage musical’s score fit the locations — a barn with a hayloft for “If I Were a Rich Man,” for instance.

And most fascinating to film buffs, “Fiddler’s Journey” gets a handle on its filmmaker, who made light Hollywood comedies (“Send Me No Flowers”) and Cold War farces (“The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming”), socially relevant dramas (“In the Heat of the Night,” “And Justice for All,” “The Hurricane”), “Fiddler” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “Moonstruck.”

The Canadian Jewison repeats his oft-told story of “always wanting to be Jewish,” growing up in Toronto, which fired his enthusiasm for bringing history, loss and suffering to this story of “family” in a time of turmoil and change, in musical form.

I’ve been a big fan of Jewison’s forever, but “Fiddler” is one of those movies that I rarely finish when I stop by it, channel surfing. It’s stunningly-detailed in its recreation of a lost time and place and that always stops me and makes me watch for a bit. A couple of production numbers dazzle even today, and the gorgeous cinematography reminds one of the glories of celluloid. But only a couple of performances seem stand up, with Topol’s broad gestures (he wasn’t alone) still seeming scaled for the stage. There’s simply no “star power” to it.

Maybe it’s the almost mournful tone of much of “Fiddler,” the unthinkable cruelty behind pogroms and the insular nature of the culture threatened by anti-Semitism, the arcane gender attitudes and the fact that more tunes are wistful and somber like “Sunrise, Sunset” than bracing and full-blooded like “Tradition” and “If I Were a Rich Man.”

But there’s a reason the film endures and the play earns revivals, big and small, far and wide. It speaks to people the world over.

And when “Fiddler’s Journey” opens (April 29), you can see the effort it took to bring a Broadway phenomenon, with its career-defining performance by Zero Mostel as Tevye, to the screen with a cast of mostly-unknowns, a Canadian “goy” behind the camera and a lot of perfectly-costumed, perfectly-housed peasant folk living what they never knew would be their last days in the only home they’d ever known.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Norman Jewison, John Williams, Michele Marsh, Neva Small, Rosalind Harris, Sheldon Harnick, Kenneth Turan, narrated by Jeff Goldblum.

Credits: Directed by Daniell Raim, scripted by Michael Sragow and Daniel Raim. A Zeitgeist Film, a Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:28

“Furioza” takes us inside the criminal world of Polish soccer hooligans, showing us a gang that has moved beyond brawling and stealing an opposing team’s flag and into providing muscle and transport for the drug trade.

It’s a brutally violent, long and somewhat disorganized saga, sort of a Polish riff on the Italian underworld tale “Gomorrah” in tone and subject, if not in setting. This story has a conventional plot set in an unconventional subculture and milieu — soccer fandom and the drug trade of the port city of Gdynia. But there’s a messiness to that plotting that renders it a bloody, visceral and yet unsatisfying ramble between rumbles.

After a scene-setting intro that’s sort of a half-assed framing device — the frame is “closed” or explained midway through the picture — we meet a tough broad cop, Dzika (Weronika Książkiewicz), who grew up on the mean streets with two brothers. Kaszub (Wojciech Zieliński) stayed with the hooligan gang that calls itself “Furioza,” tattooed brutes who bully and beat up rival soccer fans in stadiums, or on the train on the way to or from matches. Dawid (Mateusz Banasiuk), his younger sibling, got out and became a doctor.

Dzika’s privy to police investigations into the branching out the gang has done as it devolved into a full-fledged criminal organization.

The “honor” of such hooligans ordains pre-arranged brawls with rivals in the forest, where the police can’t reach them and endless tests of strength, toughness, savagery and loyalty. But it’s no longer just loyalty to each other and “the team.” They’re in business with the thuggish smuggler/nightclub owner Antman (Szymon Bobrowski) and the grandfatherly big boss of the whole enterprise, Polanski (Janusz Chabior).

Dzika arm-twists the doctor, who seems traumatized and triggered and not nearly tough enough to pass muster with Furioza. She wants him to return to the gang to “save” his brother and help the cops get the goods on the big bosses and on Furioza’s savage co-leader, Golden (Janusz Chabior), nicknamed for his favorite tooth.

Dzika’s boss may preach (in Polish, or dubbed into English) that “A thug will always remain a thug,” but can Dawid or for that matter Dzika prove him right?

A lot of what we see here is familiar from other films (mostly British) about European soccer hooliganism. Director and co-writer Cyprian T. Olencki takes pains to go beyond the duffels stuffed with baseball bats, chains and machetes to show us Polish variations on a theme.

Furioza bargain with team management, and physically threaten their own players after a loss. They’ve institutionalized the rites of their vocation — planned brawls, uniforms of their own, matching tattoos. They’ve even come up with ways to throw the cops who lie in wait for them off their trail when traveling to away games.

Dawid, who might have never fit in with this lot, can still be handy in a punch-out. He is a doctor, after all, and the fights produce life threatening injuries.

Then there’s the gruesome, bloody-minded extortion of the drug trade — betrayals, double-crosses, torture, dismembering “snitches” and moving drugs through the port into Poland and as far afield as Ireland.

Olencki has a hard time figuring out whose point of view he wants the viewer to share. Dawid is the obvious choice as the viewer’s surrogate, but he isn’t in the opening scenes and we lose track of him for much of the movie.

That “half-assed framing device” is merely a commuter train set piece for a lot of beatings, showing just how psychotic Golden is, but with an antagonist who is only in that framing device and nowhere else in the film.

Brother Kaszub drifts into the picture late and while the performance has presence, the character’s utility in the story is hit and miss. Dzika and then her boss eat up screen time with office politics and the frustrations of running a special investigations unit that never seems to get close to Mr. Big and Mr. Bigger.

And of course Dzika and one of the brothers have history…and chemistry.

As an immersive experience, “Furioza” gets the dirty, bruised and bloodied job done, showing this sign of the Decline of Western Civilization that began with soccer fandom and has less to do with the sport the longer it goes on.

But the dawdling pace, meandering story and drifting point of view blunt this hooligan tale’s impact and pull its punches. It’s a “Clockwork Orange” without a social message, a hooliganism expose without much of a point, something the frustrating finale only underscores.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Mateusz Banasiuk, Weronika Książkiewicz, Mateusz Damięcki, Łukasz Simlat, Wojciech Zieliński, Szymon Bobrowski and Janusz Chabior.

Credits: Directed by Cyprian T. Olencki, scripted by Cyprian T. Olencki and Tomasz Klimala. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:12

They label the neighborhoods of Paris “arrondissements,” which translates as bureaucratic “districts” but in French sounds ever-so-sexy. Whatever one thinks of Notting Hill, Hyde Park, Buckhead, Park Slope or Silverlake, the allure of romance in this or that arrondissement checkmates those pieces of geography with just word and a roman numeral.

“Paris, 13th District,” titled “Les Olympiades, Paris 13e” in French, is an erotic romance from Jacques Audiard, of “Rust and Bone,” “The Sisters Brothers” and “A Prophet.” Because nobody puts this French baby in a corner, or cinematic pigeon-hole. Based on the short stories of Adrian Tomine, it’s a loosely connected love triangle of people — native French, Taiwanese-French and African-French — hooking up, connecting and disconnecting in the XIII^e arrondissement of the world’s most romantic city.

Uneven, mostly unified by erotically-charged sex scenes, a dreamy score by Rone and the sumptuous black and white cinematography of Paul Guilhaume, “Paris” very much wears its “short stories” origin in the telling. But the filmmaker, three co-screenwriters and Tomine tie them together for a story of love in the age of sex, Tinder, “hook-ups” and all the things in modern life that disconnect the two.

Emilie, played by newcomer Lucie Zhany, is a call center operator used to playing a part. As Maryline Dumot, the 20something Taiwanese-French pixie is certain of her salesmanship, and her sexual allure.

“I’m irresistible,” she tells new roommate/lover Camille (Makita Samba). And so she has proven. Camille may bear the name of a famous French courtesan of literature, but he is not just a man of letters — he’s a teacher of French planning to pursue a doctorate. He has appetites.

Emilie was looking for “a girl” roommate, but when the guy with the “girl’s name” shows up, she rolls with it. In an instant she’s hitting him with “What is your love life like?” queries, and he is batting the ball back across the net in ways that ensure they end up ruffling the sheets.

She is brusque, direct and someone who knows what she likes sexually. As their “roommate” arrangement instantly transforms to something coital, she rebuffs him with a “You’re falling in love with me (in French, with English subtitles).” He’s quick with an “I’ll watch out,” but she is serious.

And it turns out, when he reestablishes his distance, she’s the one who turns jealous, snippy and “obnoxious.” Camille moves out and moves in with a sexy teacher (Oceane Cairaty) he’s had the temerity to “bring home” with him. Poor Emilie!

Nora (Noémie Merlant) is a sex worker from Bordeaux. Her performances online as “Amber Sweet” were a side hustle. But at 33, after ten years at her uncle’s real estate firm, she’s in Paris to study law.

Her classmates are at first dismissive of this “old” lady. But some recognize her. She sees to that when she dons Amber’s tartwear and blonde wig for a campus spring break party. Her recognizing “admirers” lead to ridicule.

Shamed and rattled, she returns to real estate work, where shockingly she winds up working with Camille. Even not knowing her past, he is fated to figure out if her sex appeal was strictly an online thing, or if his beautiful colleague is an uninhibited as her alter ego.

And what’s she spending her commissions on? She’s dropped back online, to the old site where she used to perform. She’s paying good money to chat up a near doppelganger, the “new” Amber (Jehnny Beth), a woman she reveals her secrets to, and who reveals her secrets to Nora…for a fee.

No one comes off as particularly “happy” in these interconnected stories. Camille, being literary, insists that the heat of “first attraction” fades, which is why he’s quick to tell Emilie, at least (among his conquests) that “I don’t want to be a couple with anyone.” But life with his books by Rousseau seems empty, even if childish Emilie’s “rules” for their relationship incompetently confining.

“I pay to live with you and bear you” may be the best kiss-off (Camille to Emilie) you never thought of.

Nora is the “every sex worker has a story” trope modernized for the Internet hook-up age. She, like Emilie, has had something that “stunted” her growth emotionally. Unlike Emilie, Nora has a true confessor, somebody she will bare her soul to — for a fee.

Aside from visits to his newly-widowed father and aspiring stand-up sister, Camille is the least-developed character here. We’re never sure what drives him, other than the standard “men catting around” cliche.

Emilie’s interior life is glimpsed only through her surgeon sister, who judges her, and little hints that she’s on-the-spectrum in terms of social signals, tact and emotional adjustment, despite intimations that she’s quite smart.

I can’t say that all of this ties up as neatly as one might like, despite the satisfying way one character comes to grips with herself and the abrupt ways others seem to manage that as well. But Audiard has conjured up a fascinating snapshot of love in the age of easy, online-assisted sex. “Paris, 13th District” feels both authentic and thanks to its dreamy setting, as romantic as only affairs in the City of Love can be, whether they involve courtesans or college students.

Rating: R for strong sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, language and some drug use

Cast: Lucie Zhany, Makita Samba, Noémie Merlant and Jehnny Beth

Credits: Directed by Jacques Audiard, scripted by Jacques Audiard, Nicolas Livecchi, Léa Mysius and Céline Sciamma, based on the short stories of Adrian Tomine. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:45

Top tip here. One should never dip into a “Wyrmwood” zombie film around meal time — yours, or theirs.

“Wyrmwood: Apocalypse,” the sequel to 2014’s “Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead,” is a “Zombieland” meets “Soylent Green” blood-on-the-lens splatterfest. It’s probably meant to be funnier than I took it, but at least the slaughterhouse smorgasbord laid out here has a light touch.

Jay Gallagher and Bianca Bradey return from the first “Wyrmwood.” Brooke is infected, but “manageable” thanks to some serum we see Corporal Reese (Gallagher) administer in the first scene.

Brooke drops out of sight, but you can tell from the crazy in her eyes that she’ll be back, and that she’s destined to be their queen.

“Apocalypse” is about the world that’s been normalized around this (aerosol pathogen) outbreak. Soldiers in this corner of Australia have all gone “Road Warrior.” Reese hunts zombies and this new variation, “hybrids,” and delivers them to his superiors in “The Bunker,” where a hazmat-suited, blood-spattered “surgeon general” (Nicholas Boshier) is doing “experiments” in the search for a “cure.”

That serum suggests he’s made some progress. Those anti-viral pills Reese downs tell us that there might be real science going on, in spite of the torture chamber/abattoir vibe “The Bunker” gives off.

Reese lives in a DIY solo fort made of hurricane fencing and sheets of corrugated tin. He drives a Ute that Mad Max himself would be proud to park in the old family garage. He doesn’t question orders, slaughtering zombie or subduing anybody plainly not a staggering member of the walking dead.

Guy on a motorbike? Fetch him to the surgeon’s. These Aboriginal sisters, Maxi and Grace (Shantae Barnes-Cowa and Tasia Zalar)? One of them might be a hybrid. More “experiments?”

The idea of life’s ugly normalizations post-zombie apocalypse may have endured a thorough exploration in the various “Walking Dead” iterations and their many international zombie series counterparts. It’s still amusing to see the form our dystopia takes after the zombies chow down.

Reese has enslaved assorted zombies, short term, to power his pedal-driven gadgets and serve as training dummies. When he’s done with them, he dispatches each with a shot to the head.

“Wyrmwood: Apocalypse” is totally divorced from whatever’s left of city civilization (it’s all forest and field rural), and settles quickly into a “rescue” quest tale full of slaughter, sacrifice and post-Apocalyptic slang.

“Well well, turns out our surgeon general here is a BITE-hider!”

Gallagher makes a perfectly believable gruff badass, the sisters are properly plucky and the beautiful Bradey is so convincingly “gone” that Brooke would scare even the drunkest barfly out of making a pass.

The formulaic third act tends to drag on and on, but there’s still enough here for genre fans to bite their teeth into (sorry) and chew on (ahem).

Rating: unrated, seriously gory

Cast: Jay Gallagher, Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Bianca Bradey, Nicholas Boshier and Tasia Zalar

Credits: Directed by Kiah Roache-Turner, scripted by Kiah Roache-Turner and Tristan Roache-Turner. An XYZ release.

Running time: 1:28

Cristi’s out of town visitor Hadi is a German-Turkish flight attendant so handsome that he can’t wait to get him to his apartment. The elevator will do.

But when his sister drops by, she chides her brother for not taking Hadi out, showing him the Romanian sights. She echoes Hadi’s own hopes that they’d “take a drive” to “the mountains.” Nothing doing.

Cristi hasn’t even taken time off work. On the job, in this Eastern Orthodox, conservative and homophobic country, no one can know about his private life. Cristi (Conrad Mericoffer) is a cop and any public displays of his sexuality could be a career killer, at the very least.

“Poppy Field” is a Romanian drama about the state of gay life in that still-backward country, decades after the end of its totalitarian dictatorship. Eugen Jebeleanu’s brief, intimate film sees Cristi challenged at home — by Hadi (Radouan Leflahi), who frets over his closeted status, and by sister Catalina (Cendana Trifan), who berates him for not treating his lover with more respect, even if she’s sure this is just serial-dater Cristi’s “gay phase.” On the job, Cristi keeps as much to himself as his fellow Jandarmeria (police) allow. He talks of women he’s dated in the past tense, and stays silent when he’s jokingly asked if he “beats them,” perhaps a logical Romanian reason for relationships that never seem to last.

But things come to a head when he and his team are sent to break up a disturbance at the state cinema. A group of noisy, icon-wielding Orthodox protesters have disrupted a screening of a lesbian romance. In the film’s long middle act, Cristi must stand passively by as furious fanatics hurl slurs at the audience, get in the paying patrons’ and cops’ faces in a situation that isn’t helped by police presence.

Because when the cops start asking for IDs, it’s the folks who bought tickets to the movie that they seem to want to interrogate. And a guy in that audience may be discrete, but when nobody else is watching, he turns insistent.

“You’re really gonna pretend you don’t know me (in Romanian, with English subtitles)?”

Jebeleanu keeps his ambitions modest in his debut feature film. This is one man’s often-ignoble reaction to having to deny himself to half the people he knows — his colleagues. Cristi lashes out and “overcompensates,” and that only makes matters worse.

The script (by Ioana Moraru) is more concerned with introducing Cristi’s dilemma and putting him through this harrowing test than in resolving his situation — publicly or psychologically.

Mericoffer keeps this interior journey on simmer for most of the film, only exploding in his “protests too much” reaction to being confronted with some version of his true self. It’s a compact, tightly-wound performance, which suits the film beautifully.

By Western standards, “Poppy Field” may feel as dated as one protestor’s hurled insult — “Sexo-MARXIST!” But in showing Romania’s version of what the West went through decades ago in terms of simple tolerance, there’s an implied “Let’s not go back there” message to increasingly reactionary Europe and America’s reddest states that feels fraught, if not downright wearying. Maybe “It gets better,” but not without making hard, brave choices.

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity, slurs

Cast: Conrad Mericoffer, Alexandru Potocean, Radouan Leflahi, George Pistereanu and Cendana Trifan.

Credits: Directed by Eugen Jebeleanu, scripted by Ioana Moraru. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:21

“Ambulance” is 80 minutes of pure mayhem wallowing through 140-150 minutes of pure Michael Bay hokum.

The action sequences are assaultive, brutally-efficient exercises in gunplay, stunts and frenetic acting passing by in a blur as breathless as the editing team can make it, all of it set to a thundering pulse-pounding score by Lorne Balfe.

The the whole movie is glib, with a police SIS captain in tattered USC gear driving his drooling mastiff around in a vintage Fiat 500 spouting flippant dialogue, with only the rarest line standing out. The plot goes completely off the rails.

And the casting is archetypal, one long Bay cliche.

Jake Gyllenhaal turns on the “crazy Jake,” with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Manta in “Aquaman”) in the “good half-brother corrupted” sidekick role, Eiza González as this year’s Megan Fox, playing a kidnapped paramedic and Garret Dillahunt as a Josh Duhamel substitute — the cop/authority figure given to bragging that “We’re SIS…we set traps” for bad guys. “That’s how we do it.”

It opens with an emotional gut-punch and ends with an attempted reprise of that. But most of what comes in between is a life-is-cheap/nobody-ever-needs-to-reload gunfight and crash-crash-crash (in more or less real time) car chase.

Given all that, knowing that things are going to get real stupid at some point, with characters quoting Michael Bay movies (“The Rock,” “Bad Boys”), and acknowledging that the 2:16 advertised running time is an understatement, do you give yourself over to Bay’s latest non-“Transformers”/”Bad Boys” ride?

Maybe. But you’ll hate yourself in the morning.

Abdul-Mateen II plays Will, a Marine vet with a sickly wife, big medical bills and an unhelpful military insurance complex letting him down. But his “brother,” the guy whose father “took me in,” might help. Even if his wife keeps Danny’s (Gyllenhaal) phone number blocked and warns Will away.

Sure, Danny’ll help. But not with a job helping him guard a rich client’s car collection and working as a sort of flunky/personal assistant. No, Danny’s got “a score” lined up. It’s about to go down right now. You in?

Combat vet Will finds himself in a supposedly souped-up delivery van with Danny and a bunch of strangers pulling off a $32 million bank robbery in downtown LA.

The heist goes off as an homage to Michael Mann’s “Heat,” with that one unplanned interruption that springs a massive police response. Nobody shouts “It’s a TRAP!” because there isn’t time.

Hundreds of rounds are expended, robbers drop one by one, and then it’s just improvising Danny, assuring his brother that he’ll “get you home,” hijacking an ambulance that’s shown up to save a freshly-shot cop.

EMT Cam (González) is another hostage, trying to save the bleeding-out policemen as Will drives the wheels off that ambulance through the crowded streets, freeways and down the oft-filmed LA River, chased by a “Blues Brothers” supply of crashable police cars and some seriously audacious police helicopter piloting.

The jaw-dropping moments come early — Cam’s first paramedic call of the day involves a child impaled in a car crash — and almost often enough to keep us invested. There’s a hilarious cell phone/Facetime “consultation” on a grisly bit of mid-chase back-of-ambulance surgery and the choppers swoop in so low they almost sandblast the paint right off the ambulance.

But once the picture goes seriously over-the-top and Jake pays for “help” in their escape, there’s no coming back. It’s the worst of the “Fast and Furious” movies (same Dodge product placement, same Latin car culture) in Michael Bay form.

Dillahunt is the “my day off” SIS (Special Investigations Section) captain who mismanages the chase at every turn, Olivia Stambouliah is his mouthy tech/coordination assistant and Keir O’Donnell is the gay FBI agent who leaves couples-counseling to get in on the action.

“He is looking for a way out,” the Fed says, stating the SCREAMINGLY obvious.

“How do you know that?” Captain can’t-see-the-obvious replies.

Dillahunt can’t make lines like his character’s “chess match and a cage fight” analogy funny, because they aren’t. And he generally isn’t, either.

“Ambulance” is based on a Danish thriller from 2005 which I recall seeing, but don’t recall being Danish so maybe not. It can’t have stumbled along the line between self-parody and just-plain-nuts that this does.

But Gyllenhaal knows a thing about blowing up a performance to match the mayhem around him. And if Yahya Abdul-Mateen II isn’t turned into some level of “star” by his toe-to-toe-with-Jake turn, at least he’ll force a lot more of us to remember how to spell his name.

As for the movie, just add the word “stupid” to “guilty pleasure” and you’ll have it covered.

Rating:  R for intense violence, bloody images and language throughout

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Eiza González, Olivia Stambouliah and Garret Dillahunt.

Credits: Directed by Michael Bay, based on the German film “Ambulancen.” A Universal release.

Running time: 2:16

“Cobalt Blue” is an Indian “Call Me By Your Name,” a gay lad’s sexual coming-of-age tale that shares torrid sexual encounters and a few other details from the André Aciman novel that screenwriter James Ivory turned into Oscar bait film five years back.

Yes, there’s fruit. No, it’s a not a peach this time, but a tangerine, squished until it explodes in a moment of passion.

Writer-director Sachin Kundalkar, adapting his own novel, serves up one of the steamiest Indian melodramas ever with this softcore love triangle about an aspiring poet and novelist, his tomboyish field hockey star sister and the renter who takes over an upstairs room in an upper middle class family’s house in 1991 Fort Kochi, Kerala, and takes an interest in each sibling in turn.

Tanay (Neelay Mehendale) is a college kid with dreams of literary glory. “I want to write like Chekov, Pushkin and Tolstoy” he enthuses. He speaks to the spirit of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the family fish pond, and scribbles in notebooks about how “I want to write about Russian boys in Goa!”

Yes, he’s narcissistic and effeminate and he sets off the gaydar of his lusty literature professor (Neil Bhoopalam). But those academically-unethical thoughts take a back seat when the elders of the family die, freeing an apartment upstairs that Tanay craves. No. Dad wants to rent it out. But at least “a boy” rents it.

The unnamed hunk (Prateik Babbar) is effortlessly cool, a photographer and artist who favors a certain color that becomes Tanay’s obsession. Well, one of his obsessions.

“I need to quench my thirst with the lips of another,” Tanay swoons, and soon the unnamed stranger is teasing him along, taking him for midnight canoe rides and then just plain taking him.

Meanwhile, the family’s in a tizzy over a sibling who wants to marry but who can’t because of his cute Peppermint Patty of the Field Hockey world sister, who “must marry first.”

Environmental activist Anjura (Anjali Sivaraman) seems uninterested in boys, even the ones her family is hellbent on setting her up with. But that guy upstairs is catnip to all comers.

Kundalkar’s slow, lumbering tale of forbidden love is as obvious as a sloppy kiss between teenagers. The teacher passes on Rimbaud collections to his student, Tanay lends hapless Anjura moisturizer, the stranger’s “handsome but rude” brush off of Anjura is something she is sure to find irresistible.

And poor Tanay is aching through all this by composing what sounds like haiku.

“I walk with a pebble…in my sock. It hurts!”

“Cobalt Blue’s” sexual daring won’t startle Western viewers, who’ve seen decades of films this overt and far more explicit. And as a filmmaker, Kundalkar’s sense of pace seems borrowed from Russian novelists — the most long-winded ones. Watching this movie is like watching cobalt paint dry for long stretches.

But there’s almost certainly a difference in how this plays in the exotic East, where audiences conditioned by chaste Bollywood musicals and Indian melodramas don’t find the films nearly the patience-testing slogs they can seem to Western viewers.

The performances are interesting and never less than sexy, if a tad soap operatic. Babbar practically lathers himself right off the screen.

The very idea of an Indian homage to “Call Me By Your Name” would have seemed too hot to handle just a few years ago. So give Kundalkar credit for taking a shot at themes and situations that push the long-prudish boundaries of Indian cinema into virgin territory. Maybe next time, he’ll find a literary editor who’ll redline all the trite predictability, and a film editor who’ll speed things up a bit.

Rating: TV-MA, sex, partial nudity

Cast: Neelay Mehendale, Prateik Babbar, Anjali Sivaraman, Geetanjali Kulkarni and Neil Bhoopalam

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sachin Kundalkar, based on his novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:52

“Mothering Sunday” is a somber, sad tale of the gutting emptiness of loss, the unspoken-of absences of everyone who died in The Great War as remembered by an adult writer who saw this all first hand during her years “in service,” as a maid for Britain’s aristocratic rich.

Based on a novel by Graham Swift, Eva Husson’s film is equal parts writerly and painterly, with lovely visual compositions and exquisite light, decor and costuming complementing the observations and musings of its protagonist, the symbolically-named Jane Fairchild.

In that role, Odessa Young (“Assassination Nation”) is forced to on a clinic in the art of acting while nude. It’s a performance with the unselfconsciousness of one’s beautiful youth. And if the film’s too quiet and melodramatic to surprise, she at least tries to give it soulful heart that almost lets it transcend its notoriety.

Fittingly, Husson (“Girls of the Sun”) lets us see the elderly Jane, now celebrated for a novel that came from these experiences. And she’s played by the Oscar-winning legend Glenda Jackson, whose early career included a 1960s film of similar ambition and sexually nude notoriety — “Women in Love.”

Jane the maid and the cook at Beechcroft House (Patsy Ferran) are to have this “Mothering Sunday,” a church holiday conflated with the later American Mother’s Day, off. The mere name of the fourth Sunday in Lent celebration of one’s “mother church” (where one was baptized) is triggering for parents of all classes all across Britain.

It’s 1924, and every family has felt loss, none more than the Nivens. The absences at their dinner table has turned Mr. Niven (Colin Firth) into a purveyor of empty platitudes about a picnic where “We Nivens shall assemble” for an engagement announcement. “Nice to have a little joy” in their lives, he opines.

His sour, embittered wife (Olivia Colman) is having none of it. She seldom speaks and her gestures are confined to pained looks when she isn’t summoning up the cutting remarks she reserves for public chastisements of her husband’s inane, stiff-upper-lip optimism.

Jane wonders if at this gathering they’ll “tell each other the truth” and speak of those missing. But this day, Jane is off, free to “do as you please,” as Mr. Niven notes, wistfully. “Imagine that, ‘Do as you please.'”

And that means a visit to her paramour, the upper class lover (Josh O’Connor) who is the surviving scion of a nearby family, almost all alone in a great house whose elders have passed, along with siblings Paul lost in the war.

Paul is studying law and facing a marriage of almost feudal origins in its arrangements. He will wed the young woman (Emma D’Arcy) intended for his older brother. He is as resigned to this as the reckless, flapper-in-the-making Emma Hobday, who embodies the “Jazz Age” hedonism born of the mass death that shocked and created a “Lost Generation” of the dead and those hellbent on cheating death.

During their midday assignation, Jane and Paul talk of books and his predicament, leaving out the war deaths that shape it. And they have sex and dwell on the symbolism of “seed” that he can’t allow to be “planted,” and on the messy clean-up that most movies tastefully leave out of the experience.

“Mothering Sunday” skips back and forth through four timelines — a 1924 “present,” the recent (1918) past that brought Jane to Beechcroft House, a point some years in the future when she’s a bookstore clerk and aspiring writer living with a encouraging Black philosopher (Sope Dirisu), and in her dotage, when Jane is considering all her life and the many losses that intruded upon it and made her the writer she became.

The Oscar winners Colman — given one tasty “lashing out” moment, and a tender one — Firth and Jackson are the standouts in the cast, accomplishing much in just a few scenes each. D’Arcy has a few grace notes to play outside the anger Emma aims at the world and the lot in life she’s been given.

O’Connor is most interesting if you consider what his character represents — a bride-to-be’s second choice, what passes for “a catch” in a country that’s given up a generation of its young men to a pointless war.

Young is entirely too passive in the lead. Yes, Jane must keep to her “place,” hide her emotions as the Pink Floyd song suggests, “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.” But there’s little to hang onto in this character and her performance of it.

The unaffected, unselfconscious curiosity Young has to play as a nude Jane ponders the bodily fluids of intercourse and wanders the halls, portrait gallery and library of Paul’s empty house after he finally departs for his own engagement picnic is both impressive and devoid of emotion.

If a male director had pushed for such naked longueurs, there’d be “exploitation” scolding hanging over it, I dare say. Whatever it speaks of in character terms, it seems more showy and attention-grabbing here.

Still, one can’t help but envy actors and actresses (equal opportunity nudity here) who can perform such moments with some aplomb.

Whatever “Mothering Sunday” lacks in emotional payoffs, it’s the shattered tone that Husson gets across that makes it work. Few films have done as well at capturing the disorienting, utterly-deflating feeling of a grief everyone involved realizes they will never, ever get over, so there’s no sense even trying to talk about it.

As if anything could make it worse.

Rating: R, explicit sex, nudity, some profanity, smoking

Cast: Odessa Young, Colin Firth, Olivia Colman, Josh O’Connor, Patsy Ferran, Emma D’Arcy and Glenda Jackson.

Credits: Directed by Eva Husson, script by Alice Birch, based on the novel by Graham Swift. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:44

“Night Moves” is one of those ’70s to early ’80s Hollywood noirs you channel surf by, get a taste of and say “I need to come back and catch this bad boy from the beginning.”

It’s got Gene Hackman, stepping into stardom after “The Poseidon Adventure,” Arthur Penn behind the camera and that sun-faded cinematography of Bruce Surtees (“Dirty Harry,” “Play Misty for Me”) that is the epitome of the way the era looked on film.

Penn (“Bonnie and Clyde”) took a dip in the Big ’70s Noir Revival” (“The Long Goodbye,””Farewell My Lovely”) in a sexy, sordid story that captures LA and the celluloid film business of the day at its most louche and the laid back Florida Keys (Sanibel Island, actually) before Jimmy Buffett, McMansions, mass tourism and hurricanes ruined them.

Scotsman Alan Sharp’s workmanlike script — he later wrote “Rob Roy” for Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange and Tim Roth — turns Hackman into a long-retired football player who uses his size, his wiles and a little unexplained polish to charge on the high end and support himself and the working wife (Susan Clark) in middle class comfort.

An ex actress (Janet Ward) who divorced well commissions Harry Moseby to track down her wild child/wayward daughter. Delly is 16, “liberated,” sexually active and the role all but set the tone for Melanie Griffith’s career for years and years afterward. This was her first speaking part in the movies.

“When we’re all as ‘free’ as Delly, there’ll be rioting in the streets.”

James Woods plays a lowlife mechanic who works on film sets, fixing car and airplane engines, one of Delly’s paramours. Harry’s search will take him onto the set of director Joey Ziegler’s (Edward Binns) latest and into the Florida Keys, where the kid has fled to hang with her stepdad (John Crawford) and his fishing/diving charter assistant and maybe paramour (Jennifer Warren, never better).

There are “accidents,” deaths, and movie stunts set against infidelity and bad parenting, and loads of frank talk about all of it.

This character was “down on my knees to half the men in this town,” and given to crude come-ons.

“You could’ve joined me. It’s a big bath.” “Maybe some other time, when I’m feeling really dirty.”

Another character always looks freshly beaten (Woods). “What happened to your face?” “I won second prize in a fight.”

The plot’s geography feels off, in a coast-to-coast jaunts sense. I think they shot some of the LA scenes — not the movie-within-the-movie “location shoot” — in Sanibel, too.

There’s mourning after deaths, alliances are broken and then too-abruptly re-aligned. The “MacGuffin” driving all this is as arbitrary as the twists.

And the deaths-that-might-be-murders are a little tricky to reason out, for the viewer if not for Harry Moseby.

So many movies of the ’70s seems to reset their genres, and invent new ones. The modern blockbuster was born and “The Godfather” movies rethought our ever-evolving take on “The Greatest Film Ever Made.”

But when I think of the era, it’s of solid, bleached and washed-out thrillers (The notorious Eastmancolor film stock?) with chewy dialogue like this one, co-stars like Warren and Hackman swapping tough, sunbaked lines with a world weary fatalism that matched the age.

“Where were you when Kennedy got shot?” “Which Kennedy?” “Any Kennedy.”

Hackman’s vulnerable tough guy — Hey, his wife’s cheating on him with Harris Yulin, for Pete’s sake. — seems a random collection of hobbies (chess, with the film’s title a pun on “Knight Moves”), urges, urges fended off, hunches and day-late getting to the bottom of things.

But there’s craft in every moment, and not just the fights, come-ons and nervy, pitiless finale. He sneaks into his house to catch his wife with her lover. Cranks up opera on the stereo, and when Yulin’s limping cheat stumbles down, Harry bellows “How about those ADVENT speakers?”

Damn. I had Advents, too. What a great decade for speakers, and movies.

Rating: R, for violence, sex, nudity, profanity, smoking

Cast: Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Melanie Griffith, Susan Clark, Harris Yulin, Kenneth Mars, Janet Ward, John Crawford and James Woods

Credits: Directed by Arthur Penn, scripted by Alan Sharp. A Warner Brothers release on assorted streaming platforms.

Running time: 1:40