Movie Nation

A throwback martial arts fantasy like “Code of the Assassins” can’t help but summon up what one remembers of Joseph Campbell’s seminal book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” or Vladimir Propp’s “The Morphology of the Folk Tale.”

There really are only about half a dozen plots in all of fiction. And the “hero” really does have “a thousand faces,” masked or unmasked, in superhero tights, the cloak of a Jedi or an ancient warrior from Asia, the Middle East or anywhere else.

“Code of the Assassins,” released as “Song of the Assassins” in China, harks back to Asia’s version of the sort of talky, fan-friendly quests that one can see in any comic book movie from Marvel or DC. It’s got the same archetypes — fighters with specialized, supernatural skills, treacherous villains, damsels and dragon ladies — magical talismans and a wondrous object coveted by all, in this case, an ornate, sliding and folding copper map to “all of the forgotten treasures” in this version of mythic China.

It stuffs the screen with characters, exposition and conflicting motivations. And it damned near talks itself to death in the process. But all that really matters are that the fights are cool and that various warriors, assassins, princes, generals and judges “stick the superhero landing.”

Daniel Lee, director of “Three Kingdoms” and “White Vengeance,” tells a tale of a time when “assassins were used to solve problems.” Can’t release a movie that would scare the People’s Republicans who run China by giving the proles ideas, can we?

Qi Junyuan, aka “Blue Asura” (Shaofeng Feng of “1921” and “White Vengeance”) is a one-armed member of the Ghost Valley assassins guild, murderous mercenaries hired to solve geo-political and economic problems by the assorted kingdoms of ancient China. He wears a gilded mask and black cloak when on the job for South Pagoda or East Mulberry or whatever royal line bids for his services.

And that missing arm has been replaced by ancient Chinese bionic tech. He’s got a steampunk arm — the Arm of Asura — that spring loads daggers or swords into that hand and fires darts or grappling hooks that help him fly from pagoda to pagoda.

He has an overlord, Golden Mask, and a mentor, Grim Ghost.

“Let go of the hatred and prevail in righteousness, Grim Ghost/Obi Wan counsels.

And he’s got a grudge. That map he’s been summoned to steal from a general (Jun Hu) who has been sent take it from its latest owner was made by our hero’s father. Making it got his entire clan slaughtered, save for Qi Junyuan.

There’s a winning business idea tucked into the 93 minutes of the grief, guilt and its consequences drama “Rebroken.”

The film features Tobin Bell, the Once and Always “Jigsaw,” as a sort of inscrutable therapist members of a grief self-help group sneak off to see for life-changing advice, or perhaps a supernatural “do over” of the event that killed someone else and broke them. And hearing Bell’s mesmerizing growl of a whisper, dispensing the wisdom of the ages — in fortune cookie-length bites — made me wonder why he’s never turned that into an opportunity.

A Daily Affirmation by Tobin Bell seems like a website begging for our money.

“Sometimes what we think is lost is not lost at all,” life coach (Guru?) Vaughan intones. “It just needs to be rediscovered.”

He’s put a memorization mantra on LP for his latest grieving visitor (Scott Hamm Duenas, also credited with co-writing the script).

“You mind is open, you heart is clear, now open both to what is dear.”

The movie may take forever to begin, not deliver much at all when it does and end a lot less cryptically than those who wrote it think. But the owlish, soft-spoken Bell has little life lessons aplenty, just as he did in the “Saw” movies. Only this time, there’s no booby trap to lop off your fingers or grind down your scalp.

“Folks don’t always like what they discover about themselves,” Vaughan says, a warning label for ayahuasca if eve I heard one.

Duenas’s Will is the sullen guy sitting through grief group meetings, by court order, challenged to “share” his story by the group leader (Alison Haislip), badgered by cop and meeting member Bryan (co-writer Kipp Tribble) as he heads out the door after each session, dead set on walking to the liquor store and then back to his house, where a missing child’s magnetic letters still decorate the fridge with “I love you Daddy.”

Lydia (Nija Okoro) is the group member who would love to amend Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief/Dying.”

“There ought to be a sixth step...Reversal.”

She’s the one who tips Will about someone who could REALLY help. That’s how he tracks down Vaughan in a puptent on the outskirts of town. And once we get past the outrage that “NOBODY puts Tobin BELL in a PUPTENT,” we listen as he counsels Will. Whatever he’s selling, he’s giving it away. And whatever that is, you’ve got to accept it on faith.

“Listen with a clear and open mind,” he says. And here, have some LPs. Vaughan has recorded affirmations to listen to until you doze off.

This is lovely to look at. The um “story?” Hard to uh, SAY.

April 5 we find out.

Long review short, if you liked Idris Elba as the plays-by-his-own-rules DCI John Luther on the British TV series, you’ll enjoy another two hours with him in the made for Netflix film, “Luther: The Fallen Sun.” Whatever else the series promises or delivers, Elba’s effortless cool and charisma is always engaging, no matter what’s going on around him or what’s thrown at him in a story.

But for the uninitiated, here’s what Netflix pounds sterling get you when you take a project there.

This is “Luther” that spares no expense, with settings, effects and over-the-top villainy that sends him to prison and eventually to Norway to fight his foe.

Netflix spent Andy Serkis money to land him — and his breathtaking haircut — as the bad guy, and Cynthia Erivo as a cop Luther must evade and/or join forces with to save the day and his skin in the process.

Suffice it to say, series creator Neil Cross got something like a blank check to realize anything he could dream up for this latest “Luther.” But that blank check trips up almost everybody of real note who accepts it. The movies that come out of Netflix’s largesse have Netflix editing, and indulgent, “Do whatever you want” supervision.

There’s no pushback on the screenplay’s excesses, and that’s true if you’re Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”), Adam Sandler or Martin Scorsese (“The Irishman”). That’s really driven home here, as nobody involved with this is at a Scorsese/McKay level.

Luther shows up at a crime scene where a young man has gone missing. The lad’s mother (Hattie Morahan) extracts a “PROMISE me you’ll find my son” from him. But before he can, other factors come into play.

We’ve heard the lad (James Bradford) blackmailed into showing up at the place where he was nabbed. And the guy doing the blackmailing (Serkis) notes the questions being asked by the cop, makes a call declaring “I can’t allow that to happen,” and lays out a wish list of dirt.

Evidence of “any line he’s crossed…corruption,” deep secrets, legal shortcuts taken, crimes, that’s what’s needed on “analog” John Luther.

“I want (“dum dum DUuuuuuuum” music)…his shame!”

Luther finds himself exposed, accused, tried and convicted by montage. The new cop on the missing kid case (Cynthia Erivo) is a step or two behind our kidnapper. She only realizes this when relatives of many such victims are lured to a mansion where the bodies of their loves ones are hanging.

Luther only figures out the dastardly sophistication of it all when he’s secretly reached and taunted in prison. He’s got to call on old mates and contacts to stage an escape, and his old colleague retired off the force (series regular Dermot Crowley) to get him what he needs to know to trap this monster.

“€Twenty on if I get him before you get me,” is the bet. “Make it €50!”

A widowed single-mom, broken-hearted over her aging father’s decline, finds something to look forward to in stealing another woman’s husband in “One Fine Morning (“Un beau matin”), the latest navel-gazing drama from the director of “Bergman Island” and “Goodbye First Love.”

That sentence passes more judgement than writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve ever offers in this intimate romance built on close observations and not reaching conclusions about characters and their actions. It’s about stasis, death and personal rebirth, not consequences or collateral damage. It suffers from those omissions.

Léa Seydoux is Sandra, a freelance translator turning German or English speakers at conferences, D-Day reunions and other public engagements into French or English that her listeners can understand. It’s a job that requires concentration, but whose hours allow her to dote on eight-year-old daughter Linn (Camille Leban Martins) and check in frequently on her philosophy professor father (Pascal Greggory), who is losing his sight and his faculties, we eventually learn, to Benson’s syndrome, a form of dementia.

Seeing someone whose “whole life was committed to thinking” (in French with English subtitles) break down this way, hearing her father insist that “You mustn’t let people take pity on you,” brings her to tears.

But things look up when she crosses paths with an old friend of her and her late husband’s. Clément (Melvil Poupaud) is a globe-trotting scientist — a “cosmo-chemist” with a wife and son about Linn’s age. Their first conversation, in a park where they reconnect, introduces the idea that his marriage isn’t the best and that she figures “my love life is behind me.”

Neither we nor they have to be French to see that as foreplay for the affair that quickly follows.

Hansen-Løve’s film enfolds three points of view — Sandra’s work life, where every so often she lets her mind wander off-task and into the situations facing her off-duty, her tentative-then-torrid romance with the dashing scientist who happens to be great with kids, and the step-by-step decline that she, her sister (Sarah Le Picard), her father’s companion (Fejria Deliba), assorted health care workers and counselors and her mother (Nicole Garcia) witness and take steps to manage.

Her mother and father are long-divorced, but Mom still has a say and just enough distance to organize moving into a nursing home (a multi-stage process) and disposing of her husband’s apartment, mementos and vast collection of books.

Every step, every encounter with one of her father’s former students, makes Sandra weep. At least she has this new love, a man her daughter is quite taken with.

As matter of fact and real-world/real-people as “One Fine Morning” can be, there’s an airless unreality to it all. We never meet “the wife,” barely glimpse the little boy and only a few predictable “I can’t do this to them” backsliding moments address these complications of having an affair at 40.

There’s a whole ready-for-export corner of French cinema where TVs are never glimpsed, where only Schubert or Renaissance music is overheard and where the only jobs are writer, academic or translator who is also working on a project to turn the letters of Annemarie Schwarzenbach into something French academics and French speakers can read.

Think of the last 25 French films you saw, and I dare say 20 of them will meet these criteria. Even the hospital and nursing home scenes here have a film-set quiet about them, as if this is not a detail this tale of life’s details cares to bother with.

The real human emotions, seeing one’s own mortality through a failing parent, noticing how your child is impacted by this new lover and possible father figure who may not work out, get somewhat swallowed in a sort of Woody-Allen-at-his-most-pretentious-and-Bergmaneseque sterility.

Seydoux is subtle and introspective here, and a tad dull despite the obligatory nude scenes. Her sparkling work in “The French Dispatch” and showier turns in “France” and even the Bond films underscores how muted this character and this story are.

Hansen-Løve often makes personal films exploring the geography of the psyche and intellectualizing such corners of it as the creative process, love and loss. “Bergman Island” touched on the “creative couple” dynamic and can be taken as a fictional dissection of her relationship with her longtime mentor and lover, the much older and more established French filmmaker Olivier Assayas.

There’s nothing remotely that juicy or interesting going on here. And the universality of the “stage of life” experiences is somewhat lost when you remove all the edges, complications and distractions from your portrait, which then takes on the tone of “still life” more often than any movie should.

Rating: R for some sexuality, nudity and language

Cast: Léa Seydoux, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia, Camille Leban Martins and Pascal Greggory

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mia Hansen-Løve. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:52

Dopey, transgressive, off-the-wall?

Check out Matthew Broderick’s haircut.

J-Law leans into...something for this June 23 farce about “helicopter parents” trying to transaction a woman into spending time with their “undatable” 19 year old dork of a son.

A few chuckles in the trailer, often a good sign.

You’d think a guy this obsessed with private eye Philip Marlowe, particularly Elliott Gould’s interpretation of the gumshoe in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” could figure things out a lot sooner than “10 Days.”

But that’s the length of time in the title of the wry Turkish riff on Marlowe, “10 Days of a Good Man.” So it doesn’t matter if our grizzled hero, Sadik, turns and shouts at Gould’s face on his TV screen that he would’ve solved this “in TWO minutes!”

Sadik (Nejat Isler) has a few good excuses. He wasn’t always a private investigator. He used to be a lawyer. He wasn’t always alone, but his ex-wife Rezzan (Nur Fettahoglu) took his devotion for granted.

And if there’s a gumshoe story more gummed-up by a parade of characters, layers of conspiracy and story threads that yank not just Sadik but the viewer in different directions almost start to finish, I’ve blessedly avoided it. Convoluted? Muddled? Clumsy, even? Sure.

All becomes clear by the end, but what happens in the finale, film noir fans? The villain(s) talk and talk and lay it all out for us.

Sadik is summoned to the office of a former law partner (Senay Gürler) for a simple job. It’s not as simple as what the curvaceous call-girl neighbor (Ilayda Alisan) needs him to do. But…priorities.

Lawyer Maide wants Sadik to find her nanny/housekeeper/cook’s missing son. Pretty boy Tevik is his mother’s “nightingale” who disappeared from his errand-boy job at a local hair salon.

It’s right here that we buy into Sadik’s complaint (in subtitled Turkish, or dubbed) that Marlowe would’ve guessed a few things about Tevik straight away, emphasis on “straight.”

Sadik questions the mother, a hair salon colleague and the pharmacist down the street whom Sadik frequented. The private eye figures out he’s getting warm the minute burly goons grab him and hustle him into a van, in broad daylight.

Sadik Demir was certainly more polished in his previous legal life, glimpsed in flashbacks. These days, his uniform is a relatively-clean t-shirt, hoodie and corduroy overcoat. He smokes like a chimney, and only drinks whisky or milk. We can guess why.

He hears Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” in his head, and is always tracking the seconds by counting in musical tempos — andante, grave, allegro.

Sadik loves Marlowe because “He’s another guy who talks to himself, like I do.” He narrates his thoughts and even says the silent part out loud, just to himself, time and again.

He isn’t a tough guy, isn’t “packing” and yet remains somewhat unflappable, even after he’s yanked out of that van and into a torture session being presided over by the menacing “Sir” (Erdal Yildiz). Sir wants information about Tevik, too.

Every woman Sadik encounters lists “good guy” as his credentials. That’s the ex-colleague’s appeal, the plea of the nanny/housekeeper, the label his ex uses, parroted by the hooker-neighbor and by the nanny’s saucy schoolgirl daughter (Ilayda Akdoga).

Can a “good guy” with limiting tradecraft crack the case, or even survive it?

Longtime TV director Uluç Bayraktar and his screenwriters cram a season’s worth of characters and plot wrinkles into this two hour tale.

And they trot out the genre tropes, trying to conjure a Turkish delight out of movie conventions, from the “not a tough guy” to the noir narration to the “saucy schoolgirl” and the clingy, mercenary ex-wife and the good-hearted hooker, half his age, who falls for this “old man.”

The many characters and intrigues-within-intrigues make “10 Days” hard to follow. So let’s make the “saucy schoolgirl” a sort of “tart ex machina,” helping Sadik along at several points, losing her cocky oversexed swagger when she figures out she’s in over her head.

There are villains straight out of Shakespeare’s “physical defects denote evil” crutch, with refugees, human trafficking and ritual murder (the opening scene) forcing all the explanations and simplistic tidying up of the finale.

Yet Isler — he starred in director Bayraktar’s thriller “9,75” — has the charisma and presence to keep us watching, and maybe rewatching some sequences to figure out who the hell she or he is and just how the hell they connect to everyone and everything else.

Kind of an entertaining, watchable mess, this one.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Nejat Isler, Nur Fettahoglu, Ilayda Alisan, Ilayda Akdogan, Senay Gürler and Erdal Yildiz

Credits: Directed by Uluç Bayraktar, scripted by Mehmet Eroglu and Damla Serim. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

Victoria Justice co-stars, with Noah Schnapp from “Stranger Things” as the seriously creepy rich kid whose education merits a head-snapping day-rate for tutoring. But he makes sure it isn’t worth it.

March 24

Spare, dark and gritty to a degree rare in Chinese cinema, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” is a thoroughly engrossing film noir about guilt and a resolve to somehow make things right.

Eddie Peng of “The Great Wall” and “Love after Love” stars as Xue-Ming Wang, a silent, stoic inmate when we meet him. He narrates his “how I got here” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) story in classic noir style — doing it, he says, to remember because prison is “a process of forgetting.”

Outside, he was a working class Wang, a poker-faced HVAC repairman with a factory worker girlfriend (Peiyao Jiang) and a two pack a day habit. One night years before, after working late, he drove home through the undeveloped outskirts of Yuxien, let himself get distracted and ran over a man.

That’s his crime, we come to discover. He wanted to leave, but came back and dragged the body into the weeds. The ways this eats at him aren’t obvious. But when he sees the victim’s widow (Sylvia Chang) giving out fliers, he shuts down the girlfriend and takes on his quest. He will stalk, inveigle himself into Mrs. Liang’s life, fixing her AC, lightly questioning her about her missing husband, her search for answers and closure. He’ll try to tell her what happened. He’ll try to turn himself in at a crowded, noisy police station.

Mostly, he’ll just be “around,” when he isn’t taking details from her and setting out to find out more about the dead man’s life.

Remembering all this from prison, he knows and we’ll find out the First Rule of a Film Noir mystery thriller. Nothing is as it first seems.

Director and co-writer Shipei Wen’s debut feature reveals this Columbia U. film school grad has a patient way of giving away his story’s secrets. Scenes are repeated, bringing new information, new details for us to consider into the story.

Our opinion of our anti-hero changes and we see him cower from responsibility, interfere with and even heroically attempt to intervene in Mrs. Liang’s plight. Wang isn’t shy about diving into a brawl. He even hurls himself into a random gang fight on a walk home. No, he doesn’t have “particular skills” in this regard. But guilt is eating at him and making him reckless.

The presence of a dogged Yuexin police detective (Yanhei Wang) tips us that this won’t just be a story about how Wang was captured. There’s more going on that the storyteller is withholding, layers that he’ll peel off for us as the mystery deepens even if the crime isn’t much that would last past one evening TV news cycle.

“Are You Lonesome Tonight?” takes its title from the 1950s tune, covered (in English) by a Chinese recording artist, a blind bar band singer and others during the course of the film. It’s one of the most evocative ballads in the Elvis repertoire and reinforces the tone and the solitary nature of Wang’s quest, and his life in prison.

Is the fictional city’s name symbolic, too? This is what turns up when you Google it.

Peng, more experienced than he looks here, makes a rugged, easily-underestimated anti-hero, a young man heedless of his own safety often as not and more cunning than you’d think. Chang gives us a widow conflicted about her loss, guilt-stricken in her own way and naive enough to not make all the connections and sense danger in this guarded young stranger who has entered her life.

Wen’s film shows us an underworld where the big impersonal State may get its man, but where crimes, by and large, go unpunished. Gangs, loan sharks, armed thugs and back alley gun dealers co-exist and cops, dogged or not, are taking their lives into their own hands when they push too hard.

This quietly riveting Cannes Golden Camera Award (Best First Feature) nominee introduces a filmmaker with a great eye and almost serene patience, and an early mastery of this genre should he choose to make it his specialty.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Eddie Peng, Sylvia Chang, Peiyao Jiang and Yanhei Wang.

Credits: Directed by Shipei Wen, scripted by Binghao Zhao, Yinou Wang and Shipei Wen. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:35

No, our most inscrutable, cerebral documentary, feature films director and occasional movie bad guy Herzog didn’t direct this. The chap who made “The Search for General Tso,” a Chinese cuisine and restaurant doc did.

But a movie about preserving proof of our lives on this planet and our shared humanity? Of course Werner H. is here.

Looks promising, if not as trippy and dreamy as a Herzog directed doc.