Movie Nation

Tying a video Russian-born video game’s sale to the West to the fall of the U.S.S.R. may be a bit of a reach. But “Tetris,” the thoroughly engrossing new film about that, lacks nothing for ambition.

But “Tetris” becomes an equal parts playful and suspenseful yarn in the hands of the director of “Filth” and “Stan & Ollie,” Jon S. Baird.

Computer programmers and commissars, Japanese hardware icons and a British media baron all take the stage in the story about the unlikely path the Gameboy-popular building-blocks game took from Russian inventor to Nintendo blockbuster.

Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, the Dutch-born, New York-raised, Tokyo-based game builder whose Bullet Proof Software gamble on a digital version of the Asian game “Go” is all but forgotten the moment he sees Tetris demonstrated at the booth next to his at the ’88 Vegas Consumer Electronics Show.

He wants rights, but most are already sold. Not in Japan, though, and that’s where he’s based. His pursuit of PC and arcade rights to Tetris and to get Nintendo to commit to “partnering” for it are how this journey down the rabbit hole begins.

There’s this Hungarian/British tech businessman Robert Stein (Toby Jones, in rare form) who hunts for games in the U.S.S.R., and who discovers one that has been shared by everybody who has a computer there. He’s got the rights to it, and with the backing of Soviet leader Gorbachev’s multi-media billionaire “friend,” Robert Maxwell (Roger Allam, vocally, temperamentally and prosthetically perfect), he figures the world is his oyster.

Japanese rights? Sure. Go ahead.

But Rogers’ mesmerizing sales pitch to Nintendo’s founder, Hiroshi Yamauchi (Togo Igawa), all about how “partners are what make us great,” because that’s “why Mario (Super Mario Brothers) has Luigi,” may all be for naught.

The Russians have little idea of what’s become of this game, what contracts have been signed, what’s valid and how to cope with these damned eager beaver Western and Far Eastern capitalists. The inventor of the game, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov)? He’s been cut out of the conversation altogether.

As it’s the very late ’80s, the U.S.S.R. is just entering its death spiral, with some officials dogmatically toeing the Communist Party all-for-the-state line and ready to drive a bargain, and others looking for bribes because the End if Nigh, why not fly there — illegally — and try to negotiate in-person with people who have spent decades making Westerners they don’t like disappear?

Egerton manages a fine American accent and even tosses Japanese in as we see what this all-or-nothing gamble is doing to his wife (Ayane), family and Tokyo home life. He’s perfectly cast as a born salesman with the pluck to risk hearing direct threats from assorted Russians and yet persist. Rogers is that desperate.

“I am not going home without a deal.”

The Soviet/Russian skullduggery sequences, with game-inventor Pajitnov straining to keep his head down lest he lose it, are menacing and maddening. Each concerned party is being played off against the rest by mistrustful Russians who are the least trustworthy of all.

Baird inserts digital block-ish Gameboy-styled graphics into random scenes — a building about to be visited, a car chase — to playful effect. The score has “bleeps” and “beeps” tucked into it in between Russian-language versions of the pop radio hits of the day — “Heart of Glass” among them.

The portrayal of the Maxwells — by Allan and Anthony Boyle as the prickly and insecure heir taking charge of this negotiation, Kevin Maxwell — are just delicious. We may know what’s coming, remembering the downfall of the Hungarian-born British media baron and just-as-right-wing rival to Rupert Murdoch. But we can savor it as his company’s digital game division scrambles to score a big win even as the cash has run out.

“Tetris” suffers somewhat from a complicated plot rendered in broad strokes and a story told kind of piecemeal. The opening act is Rogers explaining how Tetris is about to be the next big thing and how negotiations are going so far to a skeptical banker (Nicky Yune). That framing device falls by the wayside as trips are taken, deals are struck and then reneged on, seemingly by everyone but Rogers.

Screenwriter Noah Pink, who wrote the docu-drama series “Genius” for National Geographic, wrestles with a complex and convoluted story and manages to make the murk as clear as it probably can be made. It was always going to be hard to follow all this, and how it ties in to the Fall of Berlin Wall.

But the players, the stakes and the milieu make “Tetris” well worth your time, especially for anyone nostalgic for all the time we wasted on this simple yet elementally addicting game.

Rating: R, beatings, profanity

Cast: Taron Egerton, Nikita Efremov, Ayane, Nicky Yune, Toby Jones, Olag Stefan, Toyo Nagawa, Anthony Boyle and Roger Allam

Credits: Directed by Jon S. Baird, scripted by Noah Pink. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:58

Shazad Latif, Sajal Ally, Shabana Azmil and Emma Thompson also star in this May 5 release.

But about that title…

“Rimini” is a darkly-comic Austrian tale of a Lounge Singer in Winter, figuratively and literally.

This Ulrich Seidl film is set in the Italian resort city in the off-season, when the snow blows and the water park is closed. That’s when the penny-pinching German and Austrian seniors make the trek South to stay in discounted resorts, to play the slots and listen to the aging pop crooner Richie Bravo sing Italian love ballads in German.

Yes, every single thing about that is amusingly messed-up. The writer-director of the ironically titled “Paradise” trilogy is giving us a “Broadway Danny Rose” set in a forlorn, seen-better-days “Atlantic City,” here on the Adriatic Coast.

Seidl’s frequent alter ego Michael Thomas plays Richie, a glad-handing, dyed-blond, Van Dyked and biker-burly “star” whose voice has aged into a light baritone.

We meet him as he shows up at the Austrian house he grew up in, drinking, horsing around and reminiscing with his brother (George Freedrich). He’s come to bury their mother. And that means they must fetch their aged, demented father from the nursing him and hope he doesn’t break into Austrian marching songs from WWII during the almost-empty service.

That deadpan get-away isn’t exactly a vacation from Riche’s real life. But as Richie lives in a vacation Mecca, that’s poetic justice. He strides along the snowy boardwalks in his snakeskin boots and elkskin coat, muttering at the homeless Middle Eastern refugees he sees everywhere.

He gets dolled-up for his stage aact, singing along to a backing track for busloads of tourists. He works the crowd after shows, drinks with the customers and collects a pittance for his labor, it being the off-season. And he answers his always-ringing phone. Richie is a man in demand. The ageing crooner’s ageing fans have needs. He’s a singer and sex worker.

“Angela, my darling! How could I forget!” (in German and sometimes Italian with English subtitles). He’ll be right over.

The singing is credibly corny, the sex scenes drily comical. “Ageing gracefully” doesn’t fit into the picture when your fan/”client” has her bedridden, even-older mother not-really-asleep in the next room as you slake her um, thirst.

But Richie’s got a nice townhouse, filled with costumes and mementos. He’s not really “living the dream,” but he is managing to live the delusion. We almost feel sorry for him, but not quite

Then his angry, long-estranged daughter Tessa (Tessa Göttlicher) arrives, stalks him and eventually reintroduces herself to the old creep who came onto her after his show the night before. She’s come of age, and she wants all the child support — and NOTHING else — that he owes her.

A guilt-ridden Richie has to scrape together cash for a raging fury who won’t agree to just sit down and talk and reconnect. Her tone and the silent Arabic boyfriend who accompanies her to their meet-ups just reinforce the feeling that this is a shakedown.

It’s probably what Richie deserves, but man, does this cramp his style. He’s got to sell jewelry, beg borrow and steal, and all of that could give a sex worker performance anxiety in the bargain.

Seidl has a droll, straightforward way with this material. As with his name-making “Paradise” films of a dozen years ago, he’s not content to let a single film make his points about personalities, Austrian life and the Austrian psyche in a single movie. He’s made a follow-up film, “Sparta,” focusing on Richie’s brother’s lot in life.

The inclusion of the aged, tuned-out father (Hans-Michael Rehberg, who died after filming his scenes) suggests a sort of Austrian guilt as subtext. Dad is dying alone, miserable and trapped. The generation folks like this raised has its reasons for keeping its distance. But they aren’t happy or guilt-free, either.

Thomas’s engagingly repellant, larger-than-life turn as Richie hints at the way Hollywood could cast and remake this. Because we all know how much the burly and vain Russell Crowe loves to sing.

But why wait? “Rimini” gives us the unadulterated melancholy of living your worst life in the best place you could hope, only not at the time of year anyone would prefer.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Michael Thomas, Tessa Göttlicher, Georg Friedrich and Hans-Michael Rehberg

Credits: Directed by Ulrich Seidl, scripted by Ulrich Seidl and Veronika Franz A Big World Pictures release.

Running time: 1:55

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” has a badass star…and Chris Pine (Sorry, nobody puts Michelle Rodriguez in a bad-ass back seat).

And it opens next week.

The producers pulling together a long-expected sequel to “Twister” would be wise to take a look at “Supercell” before shooting starts. It’s a “Twister” sequel in everything but name.

A kid grows up in Florida, where his blonde, ex-storm scientist mother moved him after his famous storm-chasing died in the line of duty years before? The teen runs off to Texas where an uncle now tracks tornadoes and drives paying customers around for a bullying, grizzled and storm-obsessed tour operator?

That would have been an excellent plot to build “Twisters,” slated for release in 2024, around. The filmmakers of “Supercell” think so, too. The teen does a Google search for his dad, and one of the names he scrolls past is Bill Paxton, the late star of that 1996 hit.

“Supercell” is the last or next to last film Anne Heche made before she died. Its “bullying, grizzled and storm-obsessed tour operator” is played by Alec Baldwin, who makes lines like “Storm chasing is 90% driving and 10% witnessing the Creator’s Wrath” work.

Truth be told, a lot of this debut feature by director/co-writer Herbert James Winterstern works. Consider its structure and shooting strategy, capturing the stark beauty of the great, flat middle of America’s Tornado Alley, that Texas to North Dakota belt that this Montana-based production depicts. Listen for the French horns in the emotional moments of the Corey Wallace score.

This guy isn’t fooling around. He’s doing Spielberg, a “Close Encounters/E.T.” take on storm chasing. Hey, if you’re gonna steal…

A prologue that avoids showing adult faces lets us see a little boy learning weather basics as he’s eyeballing storms from his dad, and caution from his mother. The kid is handed Dad’s stethoscope and told that “Mom is inventing something” that will let the world “hear” storms about to turn tornadic from far enough off to save lives.

Close-ups of hands grabbing radios or dial cell phones, a “Brody Storm Labs” truck peels out, a child walks up to a Spielbergian window to glimpse an awesome “Close Encounter” in the making and a tragedy, mostly off-camera, is heard on shortwave radio and seen in the unanswered cell phone in an overturned truck.

That seven minute prologue is so beautifully handled it should give Winterstern a dandy sizzle reel to show folks when he’s trying to line up work, even if not a lot of people see “Supercell.”

Here’s what you’ll miss if you don’t.

Daniel Diemer of TV’s “The Midnight Club” is Will Brody, son of the “legendary” storm chaser, a teen helping his mom clean houses in BFE, Florida because that’s where she moved them and that’s what she does after the trauma of losing her husband and two Oklahoma University grad students did to her.

Will’s grown up not knowing his dad, and obsessed with storms and the DIY gear his parents invented to “listen” to them. That gadget gets him in trouble when he keeps it in a backpack at school. The principal and the cops thought it was a bomb.

When he bolts out a window to climb on the roof in “the lightning capital of America” (Florida) to use it, they get it. Longtime rich girl crush Hunter (Jordan Kristine Seamón), the one giving him driving lessons in her vintage Mustang, is further smitten.

Dad’s old journal arriving in the mail has Will hitchhiking to Texas, just showing up at Uncle Roy’s (Skeet Ulrich) door. That’s how he falls in with “Brody Storm Chasers,” a company named for his uncle and his late father but owned by gonzo, low-rent capitalist Zane (Baldwin).

When Mom finds out, she’s “There’s no place safe in that entire TIME zone this time of year” pissed. But since her truck’s broke, she’ll have to ride share to Texas with Danger Boy-loving Hunter.

They’d better hurry. It’s that time of year.

The state of the art in digital effects is in a different universe than the one “Twister” was filmed in, so much so that the late Ms. Heche was able to film two convincing and perfectly watchable tornado movies in the last couple of years of her life — this one and the more tense and perilous “13 Minutes.”

Nobody is going to call “Supercell” a great film. There’s a blown line or two, attempts at humor seem strained, more suspense was needed as the Big Storm payoffs arrive too-abruptly. Characters are thinly-developed and its corny enough to be predictable, even though there aren’t really enough tornado tales on film that one could call it a genre.

But it is well-thought-out, beautifully shot by Andrew Jeric (“Sightless”) and the actors, playing stock “types,” add value with performances that land, even when characters are doing one of the “three things” you should never risk in a tornado, even as the sentimental script is skipping past a teenager’s questions about the afterlife so that we can get to a scene where today’s storm chasers slow-clap the son of their late idol.

It isn’t “Twisters.” But if the makers of that sequel have the good sense to sample everything else that’s been done on the subject recently, it is a film that sets the bar for them. A little script-doctoring, a few family photos of the late Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman and the presence of Oscar-winner Helen Hunt and you’ve got yourself the outline, the tone and the look of a movie almost sure to be a hit.

Rating: PG-13 (Profanity, some peril, smoking)

Cast: Daniel Diemer, Anne Heche, Jordan Kristine Seamón, Skeet Ulrich and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by Herbert James Winterstern, scripted by Herbert James Winterstern and Anna Elizbeth James. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:40

“Shazam: Fury of the Gods” stumbles down the narrow line between “kid-friendly” and “just plain juvenile.” As the “Shazam” movies are engineered for a younger audience, Janie and Johnny’s first comic book movie, that isn’t a blanket condemnation.

It rises to cute, every now and then. The effects are decent and a few of the one-liners land. The tone is light throughout. And there’s a grand product placement gag.

The guest stars include an Oscar winner (Helen Mirren) and an actress who never lets us see “What did my agent get me into?” But we feel it in Lucy Liu’s sometimes uncomfortable turn as an armor-clad warrior required to ride a CGI driftwood dragon through the skies and down the Streets of Philadelphia.

While “Fury of the Gods” shares tropes and story elements with most other comic book movies, there’s a dash of cribbed Harry Potter magic dust sprinkled in too-obvious borrowings, and a narrative barely worthy of that label. Even by comic book movie standards, this is something of a stiff.

Billy Batson (Asher Angel) is still living with his foster “fam,” including five kids he shared super powers with when a wizard (Djimon Hounsou) passed them on to him. They’re teenagers who transform into beefy super heroes played by Zachary Levi, Grace Caroline Currey, Adam Brody, Meagan Good, Ross Butler, and D.J. Cotrona when they say “Shazam!”

But as they fight crime and try to save folks from a crumbling bridge, for instance, not everything goes to plan. “Philly Fiascos” is not the greatest name for a gang of super friends who team up, “All, or none,” on every problem they face.

But at home, they’re just kids. And at school, nebbishy, crutch-using Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) is still bullied.

A new threat has come their way. The magical wooden staff used to bestow their powers on them was broken after using, and has turned up in a Greek museum. That’s where two armed warrior princesses, Daughters of Atlas (Mirren and Liu) find it, steal it and set out to track down the kids who have the powers it conveyed to them.

That cute new girl at school (Rachel Zegler) taking the time to talk to the annoying Freddy? You know she’s too good to be true.

At least the wizard they once conferred with (Hounsou) didn’t turn to dust after all.

“Aren’t you dead-ass dead?”

That’s the caliber of the jokes here — juvenile, a little swearing teenaged.

Shazam’s hero’s journey is to face Hespera (Mirren) and his own feelings of inadequacy and immaturity.

“You play the part of a man, but you do not play it well.”

Everyone is tested, and the answer is always going to be working as a “fam” and understanding that “The most powerful thing in you, is YOU.”

Levi is still committed to the part and gives the character a big kid vibe, and that spreads among the regulars in the cast, even the ones with little to do in this sequel.

“Annabelle: Creation” director David F. Sandberg (look for her as a prop) keeps the fights and monsters visually coherent and easy enough to follow.

But the villains are generally bland, everything between the fights is dull and trips into a “Hogwarts as Imagined by Maurice Escher” kiddie superhero “lair” add almost nothing.

I’m inclined to cut comic book films made expressly for kids a little slack, but if the new head of the DC comic book film universe isn’t endorsing this corner of their empire, despite cross-over cameos in the finale and after-credits teasers, you can see why.

They may have wrung everything out of “Shazam” in just one movie. And this is just that movie’s inferior sequel.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, and language

Cast: Zachary Levi, Helen Mirren, Lucy Liu, Rachel Zegler, Meagan Good, Jack Dylan Grazer, Grace Caroline Currey, Asher Angel, Adam Brody, Diedrich Bader, and Djimon Hounsou

Credits: Directed by David F. Sandberg, scripted by Henry Gayden, Chris Morgan and Bill Parker. A New Line/Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:10

It’s 2023. Maybe the world is finally ready for Little Richard and everything he unleashed

April 21, from Magnolia and CNN Films.

The Beijing-based husband and wife team of Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka’s latest portrait of China’s Generation Xi follows a protagonist from their drama “The Foolish Bird” into college but unable to escape the rootlessness and grind that the country’s work-first/money-obsessed modernization has woven into the fabric of life.

“Stonewalling” follows 20 year-old Lynn through an unplanned pregnancy. A limiting education (“Flight Attendant” is her major) propped up by a life of part-time jobs and side hustles all point to an aimlessness that sends her back home, where we see her limited parents burdened by the same grind she sees for herself.

Whatever the ecological and economic benefits of a generations-long “One Child” policy, it slams up against demographic despair as young people come of age on the back end of boom in which their parents often left them behind to move to a city to make money. They’ve grown up unmoored and uncertain of the future and their prospects, and just in time for COVID-19.

We meet Lynn at a Changsha party for the English school where she’s been studying, in addition to her university/trade school, which is teaching her first aid and everything else you need to know to be a flight attendant.

Her more outgoing live-in boyfriend is into modeling and MCing contests and the like, and is all-in on the plans of everybody at this small school’s bilingual dinner party. Learn English, get a job as a flight attendant or anything multi-lingual, and move to Australia, the UK or elsewhere the first chance you get.

Introverted Lynn (Yao Honggui) hasn’t mastered English, won’t mingle and feels ill at ease. She won’t commit to the boyfriend’s “plan.” Meanwhile, she’s doing everything she can to hustle up cash — dressing up as a bride to be a greeter at a jewelry store, even selling her eggs to the infertile.

That last side hustle is where she figures out why her breasts are hurting. She can’t donate eggs. Not yet, anyway. She’s pregnant. Still, she goes through the screening process and we pick up on some of the “tests.” With every prospective parent wanting an attractive child with a “high IQ” and “good DNA,” it’s obvious a lot of her fellow applicants can’t answer simple math questions which are this “agency’s” informal IQ test.

Gaunt Lynn doesn’t look all that healthy herself. As we get to know her, see her bullied towards an abortion by her boyfriend and then go home to live with her parents, we have to wonder about how intellectually prepared she is for the world.

Her mother’s a flighty gynecologist who runs her own “clinic” but has enthusiastically fallen into a multi-level marketing scheme for “Vital Cream,” whose enthusiastic pitch-men she parrots at sales meetings which play like TED talks for pyramid scammers.

That’s a subtext of this deliberate and sometimes touching drama. Lynn is confronted by “I just got into this business” salespeople on the subway, in every office she seems to visit in search of work. It’s a culture dedicated to working, selling and scraping together as much money as possible with every waking minute. She herself has to pitch in at Dad’s shop, which has a run on masks as soon as “the virus from Wuhan” makes the news.

Everybody tries to talk her into an abortion, especially her mother. But Mom had an “accident” at the clinic, and she’s having to pay off a family whose pregnancy she botched. That’s why Lynn has been sending money home despite going to college and taking English classes on the side.

And that’s a tipping point in her Big Decision. She’s ditched the boyfriend. Now she’s going to carry the baby to term to “give to the family” that lost theirs thanks to her mother’s blunder.

Even that decision is subject to endless negotiations between Mom and the “cousin” of the woman wronged by Mom’s mistake. China is all business, with everybody mistrusting everybody else, and there’d be a contract to sign if this whole idea wasn’t off-the-books and illegal.

Yao brings a naive frailty to her performance, a very young woman who doesn’t know the biological basics of this or that procedure she’s considering, unhappy in her relationship before the pregnancy, slow to break free of it when this new stress is put on it.

But I have to say this film, which finally finds some genuinely moving moments in the third act, is slow to the point of laborious. Lives are observed with a decent degree of closeness (Lynn’s father slaps around her mother, and she has to intervene in one of their many fights). It’s just that there isn’t enough story here to justify the excessive run time, despite the vast collection of details that add up to a picture of China that’s something other than State Approved.

The pathos of the third act is somewhat muted as our co-writers/directors never develop the affair that led to the pregnancy or overtly get at Lynn’s ennui and angst.

Still, it’s worth checking out “Stonewalling” just to see a picture of China that’s not State Approved or attempted by outsiders. This is a culture people are growing up in, and a generation of them are “lost,” with many hell bent on escaping for all sorts of reasons.

Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Honggui Yao

Credits: Scripted and directed by Huang Ji and Ryûji Otsuka. A KimStim release

Running time: 2:28

Big name guest stars, same jokey tone. Could be fun. Let’s see.

“John Wick: Chapter 4” is way cool, and way too damned long.

It is the epic and epic-length installment in a franchise that’s served up “the same, only more of it” with each fresh outing, a lurid, violent, over-armed, over-designed thriller with video-game brawls and comic book compositions.

The script? Aside from the pithy aphorisms and fortune cookie profundities, it really isn’t much. But stuntman turned “John Wick” director Chad Stahelski, production designer Kevin Kavanaugh and cinematographer Dan Lautsen serve up standard-setting set pieces and homages, battle royales in grand spaces that had me going, “Wait, how the HELL did they get permission to film THERE?”

I’m not going to spoil them by listing them. But if you’ve been Paris and its environs, you will be gobsmacked at all the places we and John Wick go.

It begins in “Lawrence of Arabia” and climaxes with “The Warriors,” with a lot of John Woo and Walter Hill in the middle acts. Sure, they overreach. The “Lawrence” homage is pointless aside from the matched locations, simply another way to set up the last “kill John Wick” feeding frenzy. And “The Warriors” finale is more a ripoff than an homage.

Top tip? If you’re radio reference to “The Warriors” in Paris, go to the trouble of finding a French cover of “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide.”

“Chapter 4” is packed with fan-friendly “fan service” casting. We’ve got Ian McShane, Lance Reddick and Laurence Fishburne back for an Encore with Keanu. Hiroyuki Sanada of “Sunshine,” “Westworld” and Keanu’s “47 Ronin” runs the Osaka “Continental Hotel” for hitmen and hitwomen. Walter Hill alumnus Clancy Brown is a high priest of the secret society of hired killers. B-movie martial arts star Scott Adkins shows up as an obese, gold-toothed Russian mobster, and just kills it in his best role in ages.

And the great Donnie Yen strolls on set in sunglasses, another “blind swordsman” character that pretty much steals the movie, exactly the way he stole “Rogue One.”

Revel in their presence, enjoy the even more over-the-top fights and the grandeur of the locations and set-pieces. Try not to notice how repetitive it all is, from the start, as each action beat strives to outdo all that have come before.

The continuing story — assassin’s guild outcast John Wick (Keanu Reeves) takes his revenge tour, on horseback, to Jordan. He crosses a line there, and all of a sudden everything in his world is attacked in a new round of tit for rat-a-tat-tats.

His favorite hotel and hotelier are threatened and the price on his head spikes as he seeks relief, revenge and resolution in the assassin’s dens and over-designed nightclubs of Berlin, the expansive Continental Hotel Osaka and its bamboo Zen gardens, and the historic sights of Paris.

John Wick is pursued by the highborn Marquis, given an aristocratic venom by Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgård. “The High Table” has empowered this inbred creep with the authority to destroy Wickworld and John Wick in it. No pardons, no hope for pardon or redemption.

“Second chances are the refuge of men who fail.”

The Henchman Who Will Not Die (Marko Zaror) is added to the ranks of The Best Who Faced John Wick. And of all those hitfolk out to cash in his contract, the most persistent is the Man with a Dog, “Mr. Nobody,” aka a “Tracker” (Shamier Anderson).

“I’m going…to kill them all,” Wick vows.

“Not even you can kill everyone.”

We’ll see about that. His foe sees him as “but a ghost in search of a graveyard.”