Movie Nation

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.

“Punch” is a gritty yet warm Kiwi coming-of-age drama about boxing, machismo and teenaged sexual identity and discovery. Its subject matter predicts the genre cliches it can’t avoid. But some novel twists, artfully unfussy direction, sensitive performances and a strong sense of place — small town New Zealand — make it a winner.

Jim (Jordan Oosterhof) is the fighter, 17 years-old, a working class kid dutifully trained and managed by his Dad (Tim Roth), who has his eyes on the prize — Jim’s “first professional fight.”

So keep to your training. No staying up all night editing music videos out of frolics with his friends, no messing about, pre-bout with his cute girlfriend (Abigail Laurent), who calls him a “tease” for not putting out.

Jim’s a solitary sort, given to naked jogs through the volcanic sand dunes near home. That’s where he runs into another loner. Whetu (Conan Hayes) lives in a shack near the water with his dog. They’re high school classmates, but don’t hang out together. Whetu is half-Maori, and a hustler. He turns tricks for money in public restrooms to get by. His classmates gossip about it. A local cop calls him “Tiffany,” as if he’s called him that before.

So this first encounter with Jim, off campus and in the buff, is a tad awkward.

But we get a sense that Jim is a bit more empathetic and kind than his “butch” classmates. And when he wades into the surf, playing with a drone, and gets stung by jellyfish, he’s lucky there’s someone who hears his screams and comes to his aid. No, neither of them is a fan of “Friends,” since you’re wondering.

To Jim, Whetu is the natural man, living on his own, relishing the fact that “I keep the world at a distance.” Whetu marvels at Jim’s artistic side and his Dad’s insistence that his boy box.

“This whole f—-n’ town REEKS of testosterone.”

A friendship forms, which is one of the ways Jim takes his eye off his “prize,” and the rest of his life. Dad’s too old to be working as a laborer at a cement mill. He’s sick, too. But damned if he isn’t going to get his kid ready for his professional debut.

“Dad, I’ve got a life.” “Not any more, you ain’t. You’re a boxer.“

The melodramatic touches include the father’s hidden illness, Whetu’s love of singing and songwriting and his bitchy defiance in the face of gay-shaming at school, gay-bashing off campus.

No potential same sex romance could begin without boys-being-boys roughhousing.

And no fight picture would be complete without a “dirty (rival) manager” trying to steer the kid away from his old man and into a career he’s not really sure he wants.

Writer-diector Welby Ings’ debut feature may traffic in those tropes. But he keeps his focus on the central characters, leaving few of their story threads unstitched as he allows the rest of the cast to quietly melt into the naturalistic background.

Roth’s signing on the dotted line got the picture made, and he gives his latest rock-solid turn in support as an aging, sickly alcoholic racing against the clock to try and make something of his kid, not really up to the task.

That gives our promising leads the spotlight and their first ever starring roles, and Oosterhof and Hayes don’t disappoint. These are nuanced performances, characters with a soft center but an edge they make certain to trot out when challenged or threatened.

Ings and his stars ensure that “Punch” turns out to be a lot more than a working New Zealand vacation for Roth, and a boxing picture with enough more interesting stuff going on that time in the ring is almost a dramatic afterthought.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex, alcohol abuse, marijuana and profanity

Cast: Jordan Oosterhof, Conan Hayes, Abigail Laurent, Karl Willetts and Tim Roth

Credits: Scripted and directed by Welby Ings. A Darkstar release.

Running time: 1:39

A Gospel-tinged music comedy about an R & B singer who comes South to stay with family only to find a new route to glory via throwing a lot of razzle and dazzle and rhythm and blues at “church music.”

Didn’t Cuba Gooding Jr. do something like this?

“Praise This” stars Chloe Bailey, Tristan Mack Wilds, Quavo, Rafael Castillo, Lauren Lott, Cocoa Brown and Anjelika Washington and comes to Peacock TV April 7.

Germany, Turkey and Croatia aren’t exactly hotspots for romantic comedies. But today’s “Around the World with Netflix” offering samples all three languages and cultures for a stunningly scenic and sometimes adorable bit of formulaic fun.

“Faraway” is about a neglected wife and taken-for-granted mother, wife and daughter who flees from Germany to Croatia after her elderly mother dies. Because sometimes, all it takes is a change of scene to figure out — in an instant, or maybe a few days of instants — just how miserable you are.

We learn an awful lot about the Turco-German Zeynep (Naomi Krauss) in one harried morning breakfast scene.

Her dad (Vedak Erincin) treats her like a washerwoman and valet as she scrambles to get everyone up and fed and ready for the day. Her laid-back husband (Adnan Maral), a chef running their restaurant, is leisurely enjoying his breakfast and thinks nothing of eating the lone piece of toast she buttered for herself to gulp down in a dash. Her college-age daughter (Bahar Balci) is a sullen, phone-distracted brat too lazy to get a move on, and determined to dress down and tart up for the day’s big event.

We’ve barely had time to process what jerks they are, to a one, when we realize what day today is. Zeynep is burying her mother.

An elderly lawyer upstairs drops off some papers he was keeping for her mother, and they’re off to the funeral. Well, almost all of them. Husband Ilyas forgot. And he had Zeynep’s eulogy with him. She rushes into the restaurant only to find him flirting with his new cook.

That’s what sends her home to grab those “papers,” to her phone, looking up directions to Croatia, to “The Island Between the Sky and Sea” where her mother grew up. Mom secretly kept the fact that she bought a house there years ago from her self-absorbed husband. “Zeyne” swipes the restaurant’s catering van and flees.

Arriving, by ferry, in the middle of the night, she navigates to a charming, primitive (no electricity) cliffside stone cottage that began life hundreds of years ago as a stable. When she wakes up in the morning, having slept in her Spanx, she finds a naked Croat (Goran Bogdan) in the bed with her.

Therein lies a tale.

Unhappy women running away to “Eat, Pray Love” or live in Provence, Greece or “Under the Tuscan Sun” stories are practically a genre unto themselves, and “Faraway” hews to the tried and true formula of such films.

There’s a language barrier, so she and Josip — the previous owner who stayed for 15 years “until someone showed up” to claim the property — communicate in English. Cultures clash. She wants to “R & B” the place, prompting him to correct her to “Airbnb” and flip the eff out.

But we know where this “meet cute” — “I barely recognize you with your clothes on!” — is going, even as Zeyne comes to grips with the life she is hellbent on not going back to, even as the hunky young real estate agent Conrad (Artjom Gilz) puts the drunken moves on her.

Josip takes to calling that greedy swine “Macron,” which fits. But he’s moved out of the house and into a tent in the yard with his goat, and sets out to sabotage Zeyne’s property-owning plans.

There’s nothing all that deep going on here, just a woman “finding herself” in cultures not known for stories about women finding themselves. The semi-comical sheep stampede arrives, right on cue, as does the flock of geese following Zeyne and her battered bicycle down the quaint country lane.

A little bisexual inclusion, an amusing brawl amongst all the men fighting for her attention, and you’ve got an international comedy that rises to “cute” just often enough to justify something you’d watch just for the novelty and beauty of the setting.

Rating: TV-MA, nudity, profanity

Cast: Naomi Krauss, Goran Bogdan, Adnan Maral, Bahar Balci and Artjom Gilz.

Credits: Directed by Vanessa Jopp, scripted by Jane Ainscough and Alex Kendall. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49