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“Tone” is the triumph of the Welsh thriller “The Feast.” Tone — in its lonely, remote setting, its chilly, unsettling characters and the deeply unpleasant things that transpire — is everything.

The Welsh language (with subtitles) tale may take some getting used to, and the finale go absurdly overboard in “explaining” it all. Mystery is far spookier, after all. “Motives” don’t have to be underlined or punched out in bold type.

But veteran British TV director Lee Haven Jones does a swell job of knocking us off balance, and keeping us there in this disturbing story of dinner party horror in an Architectural Digest showplace home in the Welsh countryside.

Cadi, a poker-faced and largely silent pub waitress brought in as replacement kitchen/serving help by the lady of the house (Nia Roberts), stands out in an instant, even in this house full of characters on the creeper spectrum. Cadi is given a gawky, ungainly and faintly sinister air by Annes Elwy, and long before we see proof, we know something about that girl isn’t right.

Nervous, highly-strung and put-out wife and mother Glenda (Roberts) is almost normal by the standards of the family surrounding her.

Businessman/hunter Gwyn (Julian Lewis Jones) likes to keep up the illusion that he’s a man’s man, providing hares for the evening’s repast. But he didn’t shoot them. He found them strung up like an offering. Not that he tells anybody this.

Wrapped-too-tight son Guto (Steffan Cennydd) is an almost antic fidget, given to practicing his electric guitar on the lawn, plainly stir crazy about his surroundings. Whatever he uses to take the edge off is not available to him here.

“You can return to London when you’ve shown us you’ve grown up.”

And it’s too-apt that sometime med-student taking a break to be a triathlete Gweirydd (Sion Alun Davies) has a name that sounds like a Welsh version of “weirdo.” He loves his unitard and his body so much he can’t look away from the mirror or keep his hands off himself. He has one look, and it’s a leer.

Cadi? She freaks out at the sound of the hunter’s shotgun, is revolted by the sight of bloody carcasses and starts spit-cleaning the glassware for the night’s “make a good impression” dinner.

Something — many things — tell us she’s not up to the job. But the guests — business manager Euros (Rhodri Meilir) and neighboring farmer Mair (Lisa Palfrey) soon show up. Let the frazzled festivities begin.

Let’s just say nobody wants to take too hard a look at what’s going down in the kitchen.

Screenwriter Roger Williams, who has many Welsh and English-speaking TV credits, serves up sibling rivalry and accidents, ancient lore in collision with modern, money-grubbing short-sightedness — all stirred into a sometimes revolting stew of conflict cooked up by the off-center and off-putting Cadi.

We can see, in a larger sense, where this is going. But the waypoints and jolts in the many titled chapters (“I Want to Make a Good Impression,” “There’s a feast awaiting us,” etc.) that play out here are largely unexpected.

The gore of the third act has been mysteriously foreshadowed in the opening image. And yet Williams and director Jones feel the need to lay it all out there in subtitled explanation, dispelling what mystery there is about the film.

The “surprise twist” is a little surprising, but it tends to break the “What the hell is she on about?” mood of the piece.

And as mood encompasses tone, the behind-the-camera folks thus almost let down the confused, endangered and overmatched characters and the actors who play them in front of it. Almost.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Annes Elwy, Nia Roberts, Julian Lewis Jones, Steffan Cennydd, Sion Alun Davies, Lisa Palfrey and Rhodri Meilir

Credits: Directed by Lee Haven Jones, scripted by Roger Williams. An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:33

“Passing” is something of an understated tease.

Actress Rebecca Hall, just seen in “The Night House,” makes her writing/directing debut a melodrama about race that hints that it might be about something more than fair-skinned Black women — one “passing” for white, the other appalled by it. It isn’t.

Filmed in the washed-out monotone of digital black and white (over-lit, with limited contrasts compared with celluloid black and white), this staid, not-quite-still-life adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel is an unflashy recreation of “Renaissance” era Harlem that comes to life thanks to its leads, who bury the spark of their connection beneath the Middle Class manners of the aspirational New York of the 1920s.

The best scene in the film is the first. An upper middle class woman (Tessa Thompson) shops and copes with a city heat wave on her own. She confers with sales clerks, hails a taxi and settles into a seat in the cool (pre-air conditioning) tea room of a swank hotel. But her stylish hat is pulled down low, covering her eyes and hair. She makes little eye contact. That’s something furtive and tentative about her demeanor.

Irene is Black, but so fair skinned she might “pass,” and we get the notion she might be doing it right now.

That’s when she makes eye contact across the tea room. The blonde looking her up and down? That’s an old friend. That’s Clare, who knew Irene as “Reenie” back when they were in school together, back before Clare (Ruth Negga of “Loving”) changed her hair, moved away and married a white man in Chicago.

And even though Irene thinks better of it, Clare insists she join her in her hotel room to catch up, have a little (illegal) nip of liquor.

Reenie has…questions. “Does he…know?”

Oh no. The businessman Clare married has no idea. And when Reenie and we meet John (Alexander Skarsgård) we can see he doesn’t have a clue. He’s even given his wife a clueless nickname, noting how she’s “grown darker and darker” over time.

“Nig,” he calls her.

Guarded but repelled, Reenie tries to avoid deeper reconnection with Clare when she and her husband move back to New York. But there’s no resisting her, and soon she’s “passing” in Reenie’s social circles, at the jazz clubs whites like to frequent in Harlem, joining the liberal writer Hugh Wentworth (Bill Camp) for high balls and bon mots, spending lots of time with Reenie and her overworked physician husband Brian (André Holland).

Reenie may smile and accept this, but Thompson (“Creed,” “Selma,” “Sylvie’s Love”) never lets go of the character’s unease, the “risks” she sees her old friend taking and what those risks say about Clare and her intrusion into Reenie’s life.

There’s a high-mindedness here that elevates a movie that on closer inspection isn’t particularly daring or revelatory.

Thompson keeps Reenie’s middle class reserve and sense of place in our minds as she avoids confrontations with Clare over her behavior and her husband over Brian’s eagerness to leave the United States.

She may protest his reading accounts of a lynching to their little boys. But Brian is blunt about why such things happen and why he thinks they should leave.

“Because they hate us, son.”

The Oscar nominated Negga makes Clare cagey enough to keep the viewer in the dark about what’s really going on — guilt because she’s denying her race, some other “history” with Reenie or a danger-loving personality that could hint at other transgressions she might consider.

Camp makes his fictional author larger than life, but the film left me confused about his presence in Reenie’s Negro League (NAACPish) functions and true connection to this world.

Hall directs with a light hand, focusing on characters and performances, and that serves her leads well. But the film lacks much in the way of heat, drama and “danger.” The “life” this movie looks in on — Harlem in its most glorious epoch — feels pristine, preserved under glass, not “lived” by flash and blood characters.

Casting Skarsgård, best known for his villainous turn in “Big Little Lies,” seems a tad on the nose.

“Passing” almost passes muster by virtue of its two winning leads. If only Hall had given them fireworks to play and a world that feels more vibrant than a faded black and white photograph.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic material, some racial slurs and smoking

Cast: Tessa Thompson, Ruth Negga, André Holland, Alexander Skarsgård and Bill Camp.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Rebecca Hall, based on the novel by Nella Larsen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

“Hell Hath No Fury” is a WWII B-movie of the type Quentin Tarantino might have worshipped during his days as a video store clerk. It could have been Italian, filmed in the ’60s and made by people who didn’t care a whit for “historical accuracy.” They were just trying to make a quick-and-dirty shoot-em up for a quick lira, or Yankee dollar.

“Hell” is C-list actors shooting it out on some Belarus-Kazakhstan location, meant to pass for 1944 France in a story cooked up by people who learned their World War II history from other B-movies.

“Fromage,” as the French would say. And not the good cheese, either.

The dialogue flips willy nilly from English to French to German, sometimes subtitled, sometimes not. There are attempts at Southern accents, gallons of fake blood spilled and Nazi gold at the end of the rainbow. Again.

The director of “The Mercenary” serves up Danish-of-Russian-descent model Nina Bergman as Marie, a French beauty who chances a life of luxury and leisure as an SS officer’s (Daniel Bernhardt) concubine within months of the Fall of France. She survives a Resistance ambush, as does her Nazi beau.

But three years later, Paris is being liberated and we see that she didn’t come out of all that smelling like roses. She’d been imprisoned, and on getting out had her head shaved and a swastika painted on it for consorting with the enemy.

Now she’s battered, dirty and humiliated, in her underwear and bargaining for her life with four American GIs (Louis Mandylor, Timothy V. Murphy, Josef Cannon and Luke LaFontaine). She knows where Nazi gold is!

But as the Major (Mandylor of “Debt Collector” and “Rambo: Last Blood”) and his charges dig up an entire French graveyard because Marie “forgot” where she hit the gold bars, they run afoul of French Resisters who covet the ingots for themselves. And then they hear the SS is on its way, too.

Only a lot of fast-talking and/or shooting will get anyone out of this. As the script is warmed over piffle, shooting it is.

“Ah dawn’t speak no f—–g FRAWG,” Mandylor Foghorn Leghorns. “But Ah unnerstan’ THAT.”

The acting ranges from adequate to pretty bad. The picture hangs on Bergman’s performance, and we should sense fear, cunning and manic efforts to fast-talk herself out of her jam. She just can’t manage it.

Some of the ordnance doesn’t look right for this theater of the war. The Americans are an integrated unit before the U.S. Army integrated.

One of the Resisters (Andrew Bering) keeps seeing and arguing with a smart aleck dead comrade in the middle of the firefights. Characters make blood curdling threats and commit betrayals, only to have a change of heart one scene later.

None of which would matter all that much if the third act twists weren’t expected, the motivations so flimsy and the firefights so hilariously drawn out.

Bernhardt’s Major Von Bruckner shows up with scores of troops, and as explosions roar and bullets rip men to shreds all around him, he dramatically rises up, pulls off his mask and then doffs his hat — glowering before unholstering his Luger to join the fray.

I could go on, as the movie does, but I won’t. “Saving Private Ryan” this isn’t. “Kelly’s Heroes” either. “Hell Hath No Fury” hath no fury, and rarely even rises to the level of “fitfully entertaining.”

Rating: R for strong/bloody violence, language throughout, and some sexual content.

Cast: Nina Bergman, Louis Mandylor, Daniel Bernhardt, Timothy V. Murphy, Andrew Bering, Josef Cannon and Charles Fathy

Credits: Directed by Jesse V. Johnson, scripted by Katharine Lee McEwan and Romain Serir. A Well Go Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:36

A bloody-minded B-movie of drug heists, prison, “cleaning up” and revenge, “Ida Red” is a straight-up B-movie with the some good performances and the odd good scene interrupted its funereal pacing and over-the-top violence.

There’s an outlandish lawlessness in play that makes you wonder how far down breakdown of the rule of law hole this country — or Oklahoma — has gone for any of this to be plausible.

It’s another “Variation on a Theme Introduced in ‘Animal Kingdom'” thriller with Oscar winner Melissa Leo, in a supporting role, as a criminal matriarch her kin are angling on getting their dying mother/aunt out of prison before she kicks the bucket.

The movie strides confidently out of the gate, stumbles to a halt and never quite gets up to speed as Feds and local law enforcement, “family” and loose ends mix it up and “clean up” after a tractor trailer drug hijacking goes wrong in the opening scene.

Josh Hartnett and Frank Grillo play son nephew Wyatt and Dallas, masterminds of a late night Interstate heist of a Federal pill shipment in which people are killed, and members of their gang aren’t reliable enough to leave alive to keep it all under wraps.

Ida Red (Leo) is able to track what they’re up to from prison, offer her “clean this up” advice and sit back, sickly and perhaps not all that mentally capable of weighing what she’s just suggested.

Because whatever pangs Dallas (Grillo) may have about snuffing out a surviving truck driver who has a Marine Corps Veteran cap, he’s a sadistic piece of work. He’ll cover this face with a pillow, shoot bystanders without compunction or regret.

With a Fed (William Forsythe) and Wyatt’s cop brother-in-law (George Carroll) breathing down their necks, how is this crime family going to tidy up, cash in and free Ida Red from prison before she breathes her last behind bars?

There’s a 15 year-old niece (Sofia Hublitz from “Ozark”) who’s starting to go wrong. Wyatt’s sister Jeannie (Deborah Ann Woll of “True Blood” and “Escape Room”) may be freaking out. She’s the one married to the cop. Wyatt? He just shrugs it off.

“It’s in the blood.”

As the bodies pile up, interrupted by this or that misstep by the teen, kidnapping a parole board member and shrugging off law enforcement’s timid inquiries, “Ida Red” teeters to and fro, never quite finding its footing and going completely off the rails in the finale.

That comes after the homage to the epic shootout in “Heat,” and some choice acting by Woll, Hartnett, Leo and Grillo — who each have one well-written scene to chew up and play with gusto.

Writer-director John Swab (“Run With the Hunted”) finds a pithy line here, a scene Grillo can chew up and spit out there. But he has no sense of pace. Genre pictures, thin on surprises and big on grit, sink or swim on their forward momentum. This Tulsa-filmed B-movie gangland thriller never has that.

“Ida Red” is good enough that we can see what the cast saw in it, and bad enough to wish another writer had taken a swipe at a rewrite (the ending is awful) and maybe producer-Swab had hunted up a flashier director — even one fresh out of film school — to helm it.

Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Josh Hartnett, Sofia Hublitz, Deborah Ann Woll, William Forsythe, George Carroll, Melissa Leo and Frank Grillo

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Swab. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:51

Whatever the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)” has to say on the subject, the movies have long maintained that there’s a thin line between “loveable eccentric” and “mentally ill.” While we’ve (mostly) progressed beyond the “all the mentally broken really need is love” cure in screenplays, the original trope and that always “thin line” is ever with us.

“The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” skips back and forth across that line. It’s a giddy then sad and somewhat forlorn biography of a great English illustrator and a man the film maintains was Britain’s original “cat fancier.”

Before Louis Wain, cats were “useful” as “mousers” and little else. But when Wain and his wife took one in as a pet, and he then started painting them, illustrating them in either cuddly and adorable poses, or silly settings (cats playing cards, golf), dog-mad Britannia went feline fur baby crazy.

And when he and his work came to America, we followed the Mother Country off that cliff.

Wain makes another grand eccentric in the repertoire of Benedict Cumberbatch. Working from a script by Simon Stephenson and the film’s director, Will Sharpe, Cumberbatch creates a somewhat manic polymath — or “poly-hobbyist,” as our droll narrator (Oscar winner Olivia Colman) describes him. Antic, full of “patents” and theories and ideas for art, he’s “on the spectrum,” we’d say today. The Victorians didn’t know what to make of him.

He pitches an opera to a famous composer without knowing how to write music, sees “electricity” everywhere, as the driving force of life and death, jumps into a bullring to get a better view of an animal he wants to draw and is scolded for his “imbecility” in big and small ways by the publisher (Toby Jones) of “The Illustrated London News.” That’s the publication that wants to hire him “at poverty wages” to be their pre-newspaper photographer illustrator of people, street scenes, fairs, sporting events, etc.

As he paints with both hands at once, Wain is unnaturally fast at this. He confesses he doesn’t “find this sort of work particularly taxing.” What convinces him to take the job are the fact that his widowed mother and his five unmarried sisters live under a home he’s supposed to provide them with.

And bossy, practical oldest sister Caroline (Andrea Riseborough, who makes a grand harridan) has hired a governess for the three youngest sisters. The governess, our narrator wryly informs us, makes Louis “tingly” inside. As he doesn’t “really know what the hell is going on,” he’ll take the job to employ the governess and try to sort out this “tingly” business in the company of Miss Emily Richardson.

She’s played by Claire Foy of “The Crown” and “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” So we get the attrraction.

Actor-turned-co-writer/director Will Sharpe’s tale is told in three acts, with the first a sort of “Miss Potter/Personal History of David Copperfield” romance between two smart, quirky oddballs from “different stations in life.” The second is where fame, success and tragedy weigh in. And the third act tells us of Wain’s greatest fame and most debilitating tragedy.

Sharpe (“The Darkest Universe”) employs color-blind casting, peopling Victorian Britain and Edwardian America (look for a Taika Waititi newspaper editor cameo) with faces with India and Africa in their heritage as fellow train travelers, friends (Richard Ayoade), boxers and business associates.

Wain liked to pay prize fighters to let him get in the ring with them, with gloves not brushes. Add that to his early obsession with and wild theories about electricity, and his later certainty that taking cats in as pets would cause them to rapidly evolve into big blue-eyed, hind-legs walking companions who converse with their hosts, and you can see how the Victorians, Edwardians and others would have regarded this fellow as something of a nut.

Cumberbatch brings a twitchy, bird-like quality to Wain, who uses constant motion to keep his demons at bay because, our narrator tells us, “His mind was a dark, screaming hurricane of crippling anxiety and recurring nightmares.”

His childhood fears are related in old-fashioned, black-and-white “iris-in” flashbacks. His way of seeing the world pops up in scenery that morphs from photography to colorful illustration.

The leads have splendid chemistry, with Foye matching Cumberbatch in studied, intense oddness — antic line-readings, wide eyes darting at the sparks each recognizes that they’re setting off with the other.

And Jones is well-cast as the kindly, Dickensian employer who gives Wain a break, a light kick and a safety net, when need be.

The first act is so upbeat and charming that when things turn sour, it can feel like a sucker punch. But the “decline and fall” isn’t precipitous, the adoration by the now-cat-worshipping masses and the richly-detailed settings make our tumble to the ground, like Wain’s, slower. That softens the blows to come.

Although the later acts slacken the pace and earn this “Electrical Life” something of a downer vibe at times, I found it fascinating even when the thrilling first 45 minutes recede into the sunset.

This won’t be the eccentric character that wins Cumberbatch an Oscar. But fans of his, of lovely recreations of Victorian Britain (skimming past its “bizarre social prejudices”) and cat lovers will find much to embrace and enjoy here. Especially the cat lovers.

Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and strong language.

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foye, Andrea Riseborough, Toby Jones, Richard Ayoade, Dorothy Atkinson, Crystal Clarke, narrated by Olivia Colman

Credits: Directed by Will Sharpe, script by Simon Stephenson and Will Sharpe. An Amazon Studios release.’

Running time: 1:52

Today’s “Around the World with Netflix” outing is a “true crime” police procedural about the hunt for a missing Italian teen, and the precedent-setting steps a dogged prosecutor took to find her, and then arrest her killer and bring him to justice.

A decade after American TV debuted “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and years after the U.S began collecting and keeping a DNA database to help track down criminals, the Yara Gambirasio case riveted Italy and eventually forced an embattled investigator/prosecutor to bring her country into this millennium, and rely on this corner of advanced police forensics.

“Yara” won’t feel dazzling and new to anyone who remembers David Caruso yanking off his sunglasses or the darkened, production-designed labs of the many “CSI” spinoffs. But it’s intriguing as a peek into a different style of criminal justice, the back door way Italy joined this world of modern policing, and a better appreciation of this theoretical (not often employed, as any prosecutor will tell you) newest tool in the murder investigator’s tool bag.

Isabella Ragonese of “Somewhere Amazing (In un posto bellissimo)” stars as Letizia, a motorcycle-riding single mom and veteran of mafia prosecutions who takes on the case of the missing teen Yara.

We meet the prosecutor, a job that puts her in charge of police investigations of capital crimes, the day a model plane hobbyist finds 13 year-old Yara’s body, months after she disappeared on her way home from gymnastics class. A positive ID means that the winter-long hope that the missing girl might still be alive — kidnapped somewhere — gone.

Flashbacks take us to the snowy November 2010 night in which Yara brought her dance/gymnastics school a replacement boom box for its classes, and introduces us to her (Chiara Bono) voice. Yara kept a diary.

Director Marco Tullio Giordana and screenwriter Grazniano Diana tell this story through two timelines — one beginning the night of the disappearance, her parents’ prompt and tearful report that she’s overdue within hours of her not coming home — the other timeline in the film’s “present,” the investigation that finally gets some traction once the police have a body and a crime scene to investigate.

The diary, read in voice-over, produces red herrings — false trails that are pursued. The family is considered, a “crush” at school, a native-Arabic speaking “foreigner” working at the construction site where the body becomes a person of interest. This police procedural emphasizes the process of elimination involved in good police work.

Letizia is attacked in the press, politicians weigh in and her Ministry of Justice boss gives away his prejudices as he lectures her, “as a father would” (in Italian with English subtitles). He needs “results. Time is running out!” Maybe a man should pitch in.

And yet years pass until the decision is made that voluntary DNA testing of everyone who might have had some connection to Yara is proposed, financed and launched, a game-changer in Italian justice, or so it’s implied.

The trial, when we see and hear it, has drama in it, and also confirms non-Italians’ bias fears, as prosecutorial innuendo battles the defense counsel’s implied suspicion of “new” science, and the judicial panel hearing the case seems intent on cutting off any chance of second-guessing their decision.

An American can’t help but think of the Amanda Knox case at the odd eye-rolling assertion, implication or conclusion is leapt to.

Ragonese lets us see the strain the case put on the prosecutor, the resignation that sets in after years of work and little progress. It’s a performance and a film with few histrionics, more dry “Law & Order” than sexy “CSI” in tone and pitch.

But like any true crime story boiled down to a feature film, it’s got a certain built-in appeal. It’s solidly built, with a couple of emotional moments tossed in with the slowly building suspense.

And again, the measures taken “over there” can look a little extreme — civil rights and privacy limits tested — to outside eyes.

If you’re into this sort of thing “Yara” might be just the sort of thing you’re into. If you’ve watched enough “CSI,” this will seem quaint, slow and dramatically thin.

Rating: TV-14, implied violence, descriptive material

Cast: Isabella Ragonese, Chiara Bono, Thomas Trabacchi, Sandra Toffolatti and Alessio Boni

Credits: Directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, scripted by Graziano Diana. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Coming back to Serge Eisenstein‘s textbook on screen editing and second best masterpiece of Soviet propaganda makes me recall when I first saw it, the MTV-80s.

Back then, filmmakers moving from TV commercials and music videos were taking over the cinema, and “MTV editing” became shorthand for any movie build out of a blur of edits.

But Eisenstein, the master of montage, had perfected the quick impression — image/cut/image action/cut style in the silent era, running with the technique D.W. Griffith popularized (some say invented) with “Potemkin” (his greatest silent film) and taking it to its absolute extreme with “October, 10 Days that Shook the World,” his Soviet docu-drama about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

“October,” co-directed and edited by Grigoriy Aleksandrov and based on American journalist and Soviet champion John Reed’s (the subject of “Reds”) book “Ten Days that Shook the World,” may have its primitive moments, simplistic and manipulative messaging. It was made for bucking up the proles — many of them still illiterate — all over the then-new U.S.S.R. to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that revolution, in 1927.

It’s not hard to imagine it flickering to life on a simple screen in a remote school, a factory wall or “workers” meeting in the far reaches of the former Russian Empire, its juxtaposition of heroic, windswept and backlit Bolsheviks with fat, sneering nobles and bourgeoisie reinforcing the talking points of The One Party dictatorship, the Fox News/OAN of its day.

A sea of scythes here, a forest of firearms there — the flurry and fury of “the people” breaking into The Winter Palace and smashing the Tsar’s wine cellar, a tidal wave of armed workers storming into government councils and seizing the members of the provisional government, climbing a statue of Tsar Alexander III and pulling it down.

This movie has been “re-staged” for the camera in revolutions, real and imaginary (the Saddam statue toppling set up by Bush II in Iraq), for 100 years.

But set aside the storytelling — with images and intertitles (some of the ones on the newish Corinth re-rerelease have misspellings) doing all the work that modern screenwriters insist on voice-over narrating or expositioning to death.

What stands out are the iconic images — “The Traitors” slipping out to sabotage train switches and trains, disappearing into a pool of black behind them, the iconic Lenin (played by Vasili Nikandrov) taking over the uprising, rousing the Central Committee and bestriding that armored car like a colossus, cheering on the masses.

And then there’s the movie’s money shots — montage, Eisenstein’s metier. A cut , an edit every 3-5 seconds that makes Paul Greengrass’s “Bourne” blur look like the digital updating of a very old and polished technique. “Proletarians, learn to use your rifle” shows us weapons, bullets, hands chambering a round and that round going into an open-sided (partially disassembled) firearm in a sequence that’s been digitally copied scores of times in the “Bullet Time” “Matrix” era.

I’ve seen “October” a few times over the years, most memorably at a college film society where one can appreciate it among fellow cognoscenti and debate its power — fading with time, but still glimpsed. It’s not as dazzling as “Potemkin,” as visually striking as “Ivan the Terrible” or “Alexander Nevsky,” which Corinth Films is packaging it with for a new (let’s unload our overstock) two DVD release.

But it’s still essential viewing for any student of the cinema, like “Birth of a Nation” or “The Big Parade” or “The General” or “Modern Times,” the silents that made the modern cinema, the movies that made motion pictures the dominant storytelling medium of the past 100 years, from nickelodeons to the Golden Age of the Podcast.

Rating: Unrated

Cast: With Vasili Nikandrov as Lenin, Nikolay Popov as Kerensky

Credits: Scripted and directed by Grigoriy Aleksandrov and Sergei M. Eisenstein, based on the John Reed book. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:43

Living on the water, I see the evidence of the poisonous litter that never goes away every single day.

Let the cranks rage about losing their Mountain Dew bottles and straws, this nightmare is killing our waterways and getting into everything and everyone.

Here’s a doc that lays that bare. Congrats to The Discovery Channel for making it, airing it, winning and Emmy and making it free to watch all this month.

For an hour or so, I wondered why exactly National Treasure Tom Hanks would take “Finch,” a sometimes cutesy, often maudlin End Times tale pairing him with a robot.

Then he gets to the “telling anecdote,” the tale his character tells to Jeff, the robot of his own creation, a story of the ways civilization ends and the humanity that disappears with it.

So I get it — a pre-pandemic one-hander with a little “Silent Running” here, some “Wall-E” there and the fear that it could go all “Omega Man” at any minute.

It’s a kid-friendly thriller of the sci-fi apocalypse variety, forlorn but engaging enough to sit through. Barely. High stakes, thin on action and heavy on sentiment, it takes “Short Circuit” to doomsday and reaches for tears — here and there — as it does.

In the title role, Hanks is the Last Man in St. Louis, scavenging for food in the still-standing supermarkets, minimarts and theaters, holing up in the factory where he once worked.

Finch tools about in a massive Komatsu dump truck, sings along to “American Pie” (“This’ll be the day that I die!”) and gets around outside in a haz-mat suit, customized to inform him when the UV radiation and simple heat in the atmosphere are more than he could tolerate.

He has a custom-built helper robot, the four-wheeled, silent and basket-equipped Dewey. And he has a dog. Much of their scavenging involves the search for cans of dog food.

Finch and Dewey download books from the company library into his next piece of tech, a walking robot. He finishes it just after the latest supercell passes through the dust bowl that was St. Louis — a city — like the world around it, baked, burned and parched out of existence after the ozone layer gave out.

Coming to life, the machine has questions. “Where is everybody?” And where are those “holes in the sky” that make it “like Swiss cheese,” that Finch talks about?

Finch takes the time to answer those questions. But he knows they need to move on. With this new gadget, he loads a customized RV so that they can all make their getaway. “West” it is. San Francisco.

The robot learns to talk, and sounds like Ukrainian comic Yakov Smirnoff impersonating Stephen Hawking. Later, the voice morphs into the cheery boyishness of Caleb Landry Jones.

Finch gives the robot “four prime directives,” adapting Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.”

“A robot cannot harm a human, or cause a human to be harmed by its inaction.”

Finch frets over Directive Four the most.

“Protect the welfare of the dog.“

As they make their way through the wastelands towards the West, Finch tells stories, urges the robot to imitate him and “take initiative, and tries to give the machine — which chooses to name itself “Jeff” — “some common (human) sense.”

There are perils out there, and not all of them involve the holes in the sky.

“I know you were born yesterday, but it’s time for you to grow up.“

Series TV director Miguel Sapochnik doesn’t fret about borrowing the endless stream of visuals and situations from other “end of the world” tales, from “Omega Man” to “Zombieland.”

There aren’t many dramatic incidents breaking up this road-trip odyssey, and the few that there are are from most every other movie we’ve ever seen in this genre.

Hanks makes a sad, stoic lead. And the robots are “Silent Running” cute enough that we worry for their safety as much as we worry for Finch’s. But maybe not as much as we worry for the dog’s.

With real apocalypses staring down at us in every direction, movies like “Finch” take on a fatalism that they sometimes lacked in earlier eras. The threats are as real as they ever were. But now, we can see that we’ve become too dense to take action to prevent them. That adds a resigned acceptance of the doom we see on screen, and we see coming on the evening news.

So yeah, it’s “kid friendly” in all the usual ways. But how often is the family in the mood for a cutesy bummer of a movie?

Rating: PG-13 for brief, violent images

Cast: Tom Hanks, the voice of Caleb Landry Jones

Credits: Directed by Miguel Sapochnik, scripted by Craig Luck and Ivor Powell. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:55

British singer-songwriter and filmmaker Jeymes Samuel got Netflix money and an all-star cast to make his follow-up to “They Die By Dawn,” a Western that gathers many of the most famous or notorious African American figures of the Old West into one story.

“The Harder They Fall” is a Blaxploitation pastiche of Spaghetti Westerns, resetting the West — brutally violent, lawless and Darwinian by myth — as a largely Black world where whites are train riders or bankers and bank customers to be robbed, or genocidal Army troopers to be massacred.

It demands an open mind — not for the characters and stereotype-smashing casting. As an opening title points out, figures such as Nat Love, “Stagecoach Mary,” Rufus Buck and Bill Pickett? “These. People. Lived.”

But as he fills the screen with an A-list that includes Oscar winner Regina King, Idris Elba, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield and others, self consciously and randomly references African American cinema classics, peppers the dialogue with a Tarantino-load of Samuel L. Jacksonisms and layers the soundtrack with reggae, hip hop and R&B, Samuel goes beyond parody and settles on just grating.

Samuel is plenty flippant. He’s just not that damned funny.

From the first moments we see costume-designed, dry-cleaned and pressed characters, gold-filagreed pistols toted by players who, as Our Lord Blackadder once cracked, “ride a horse rather less well than another horse would,” big things and small take anybody who’s ever seen a Western out of this one.

Samuel and his cast lean on “the cool parts” and “cool lines” and upend conventions, sure. But blowing so many details — beyond the intentional anachronisms — is too Sergio Leone Lite even for me.

Jonathan Majors of “Lovecraft Country” and “Last Black Man in San Francisco” is Nat Love, a preacher’s son who survives his parents’ murder, but bears the knife-mark on his forehead of their killer, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba). Needless to say, Love is looking for revenge on “the Devil himself” well into adulthood.

Nat Love’s gang robs Rufus Buck’s Crimson Hood gang, kills a lot of them, and sets up a showdown after Rufus makes his escape from custody.

So we’ve got Nat and his compadres — including old flame, shotgun-armed singer, saloon-keeper and shootist “Stagecoach” Mary Fields (Zazie Beetz), transgenderish bouncer Cuffee (Danielle Deadwyler) and others — taking on Rufus, Cherokee Bill (Stanfield), saloon-keeper “Terrible” Trudy (King) and company.

Deadwyler, of the indie Appalachian thriller “The Devil to Pay” (Track that down!) pretty much steals the show, a badass born to be under-estimated. Gunslingers?

“I seen faster,” she spits.

Where?

“In the mirror.”

Not a bad bouncer, either.

“Don’t nobody come in here gunned-up or they might could get gunned-down.”

Racial commentary is limited, which kind of misses the point of it all. Just “I seen the Devil, and Rufus Buck ain’t him — he white,” from Lindo’s Marshal Bass Reeves. And a backstabbing sheriff (Deon Cole) is dismissed with “A man like you’d have us all subservient to the end of our days.”

“You gonna just let us get away Dred Scott free?”

The story’s so “Silverado” conventional that “The Harder They Fall” needs its novel casting and soundtrack gimmicks and “Quick and the Dead” gunplay to be the least bit watchable.

Extreme close-ups for the stare-downs, split screen shootouts, oozing wounds and blasted body parts brought to mind the earlier martial arts outings of rapper-turned-filmmaker RZA — a superficial grasp of genre, whistles-and-bells action editing and the like. RZA got better.

I tried to get into the bloody campiness of it all, the anachronisms and all that. But this is a seriously soulless affair, all bullets and blood and no buckskin or satiric bite. There’s nothing wrong with the pitch, the casting (well, some folks need riding lessons) or settings. It’s the plot, the story arc and execution that Samuel screws up. And the details.

That spoils the pseudo-serious send-up he set out to make, and leaves “The Harder They Fall” far short of the parody or even homage it might have been.

Rating: Rated R for strong violence and language

Cast: Jonathan Major, Idris Elba, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo, Danielle Deadwyler, Edi Gathegi, RJ Cyler, Deon Cole, Damon Wayans Jr., Julio Cesar Cedillo and Regina King

Credits: Directed by Jeymes Samuel, scripted by Jeymes Samuel, Boaz Yakin . A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:17