Movie Nation

What, again with the incantations, the pentagrams, the “protective circle” of ashes?

Another ancient text turns to flames when you say the wrong thing?

Another horned demon skittering up the walls? Oy!

“The Offering” is a New York Jewish trip through horror tropes, an everything-but-real-frights thriller about this “taker of children” demon who comes after a pregnant woman who has joined her husband for a visit with her Ultra Orthodox father-in-law, who has been estranged from his son because the lad married a “shiksa.”

Then again, maybe Art (Nick Blood) was just trying to burn that bridge so that he wouldn’t be trapped in that ancient Brooklyn brownstone, in that family, in that tradition-obsessed culture and in his father’s business.

Father Saul (the superb character actor Allan Corduner) is a mortician, catering to the specific requirements of his faith and those who share it. Steady work and lucrative it may be. But it ain’t for everybody.

Art’s a real estate broker who needs something from his father. Wife Clara (Emily Wiseman) doesn’t know about that, and just seems relieved to have this rapprochement with her father-in-law.

Saul’s toothpick-chewing, judgmental assistant Hemish (Paul Kaye) sees through the son. But when father and his assistant decide to stick Art with handling a fresh corpse that’s come in, their “Don’t mess up,” seems, at the very least, disrespectful, even if Art used to do this work before leaving home.

Considering all that follows, it’s a big mistake on a lot of levels. An elderly, widowed scholar (Anton Trendafilov) died under supernatural circumstances. We know this from the film’s opening scene. Saul, Heimish and especially hapless Art have no idea. That knife the guy supposedly stuck in his own chest? That blue pendant around his neck? They have significance that Art has no clue about.

Uh. Oh.

The effects are good, if nothing we haven’t seen scores of times before. The acting is competent, if unaffecting, and that’s more a product of direction.

The plot’s confusing “taker of children” features allusions to missing kids and a girl demon, but seems thinly developed and sloppy.

What’s unusual and fascinating about “The Offering” in this Ultra Orthodox setting, with its exotic terminology, “ancient” lore and promise of something resembling a Jewish exorcism. I’m not sure how much of this is built on the foundations of real tradition and how much is screenplay invention, but there are indicators that this could work and the thrills could “play.”

Yes, the characters are horror tropes — consulting the “expert” on these things, a scholar whose real job is in the diamond district, the pregnant prey — as are the situations and frights. But setting them in a funeral home, in the midst of mourning (Cover that mirror or else!) is a novelty.

The bar for this version of “J-Horror” is high (“The Vigil,” “The Possession”), but not so high that “The Offering” couldn’t have managed something fresh and more interesting and at least more sensible than this.

The movie never establishes the love and devotion of the marriage, the ache of loss or the terror of Clara facing an unknown threat in an alien community that hasn’t wholly accepted her.

This “Offering” climaxes with a half-shrugged, half-shouted “Yeah, AND?”

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Nick Blood, Emily Wiseman, Paul Kaye and Allan Corduner

Credits: Directed by Oliver Park, scripted by Hank Hoffman. A Decal release.

Running time: 1:33

The movies that matter in your life burn into the memory that first encounter with them.I saw “Chariots of Fire” at a preview in Charlotte, N.C., with local college and high school track teams in attendance, at a now long-closed cinema near now-renamed UNC-Charlotte. And I remember getting downright teary over just how beautiful this lovely period piece unfolding before me was.

It’s not just the stunning images of “Out of Africa,” “Moonstruck” and “Memphis Belle” director of photography David Watkin, or the crystalline synthesizer score of Vangelis Papathanassiou. There’s the immaculate period-perfect production design, the world of weathered stone and inherited, poshly-turned-out privilege it depicts.

The cast, a blend of the fresh-faced and the legendary, is remarkable. Lump them in the with stars of the PBS import “Brideshead Revisited” and you could feel a tidal wave, a whole generation of British actors about to wash over world cinema thanks to what the Brits would spend the ensuing decades proving that they do best — recreating their recent and distant past. And the synthesizer wasn’t the only music in it. There are lush sacred choral works, snippets of the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, bagpipes and bands laced throughout. The story is a flashback within a flashback. In the “present,” we sit in on a 1978 memorial service for the Elder Statesman of British sport. Through that, we drift into that iconic image of the film, young track athletes training by running down a Scottish beach (Fife) just before the 1924 Olympics.

One of their number, Aubrey Montague (Nicholas Farrell) writes a letter home, taking us back to 1919, when he met the great sprinter Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross) as they enrolled in Trinity College in Cambridge. “Monty” and we see the intensity of the Jewish Abrahams, and his prickliness. It is just after World War I, and disabled veterans are all about, as is anti-Semitism. Abrahams is determined to stand out, win and shave their snobbery up their noses.

“I’m forever in pursuit and I don’t even know what I am chasing.”

John Gielgud and the great British director and sometime narrator and actor Lindsay Anderson (“If…,” “Oh Lucky Man,” “The Whales of August”) play the high-born “masters” of their respective colleges, anti-Semites from birth.

“Academically sound. Arrogant. Defensive to the point of pugnacity,” the Master if Caius (Anderson) intones.

“As ‘they’ invariably are,” Mr. Master of Trinity (the Oscar-winning Gielgud) sneers. Abrahamson means to win an Olympic medal a few years down the line, and his determined push for personal glory rankles the higher-ups.

Meanwhile, to the north in Scotland, the saintly Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson) is a star rugby player, the son of missionaries who grew up in China, and a man whose own mission is preaching and returning to China to spread the word of God. He is a naturally gifted runner coaxed into changing his focus, if only for a while.

“I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.”

Abrahams figures out he’s going to need a “professional” coach to best Liddell and chase a gold medal and hires the even-more-outside outsider Sam Massabini (Ian Holm). He’s also distracted by the transcendent beauty Sybil Gordon, a singing stage actress played by South African Alice Krige

Nigel Havers plays the Oxbridge dandy, renamed Lord Lindsay in the film, a “natural” athlete of title and impeccable breeding who puts down his cigarette to sprint and dash through the low-hurdles, which he masters by parking glasses of champagne on each one, vowing to “not spill a drop” as he gallops through them.

He’s meant to be adorably insufferable, and he is, although most viewers might embrace him as the embodiment of noblesse oblige and the privilege “amateur” athletics set out to test and honor.

The “villains” of the Olympics are the always-to-be-feared American Olympians, with two famous sprinters, Charles Paddock and Jackson Scholz, played by peaking stars Dennis Christopher and coiled, compact walking muscle Brad Davis (he was in producer David Puttman’s “Midnight Express”).

Location after lovely location for this film captures the place and recreates the time in glorious detail.

Some of the loveliest scenes in “Chariots of Fire” are slow motion reveries on the track. But terrific tracking shots takes us through the pell-mell that first day at Cambridge, and an intimidating peek at the American team training in Paris, all business. Note Christopher’s choice of leg warm-ups, on his back, mock-pedaling a bicycle.

Whatever the film and filmmakers’ politics, “Chariots of Fire” is an inherently conservative enterprise, never wholly mocking the high born, never wholly embracing the outsiders and most fervently celebrating the pious and divinely-inspired Liddell.

No one “brings down” the system. Abrahams merely infiltrates it and comes to be accepted as both “a gentleman,” a patriot and “one of us.”

“Chariots” exists in a few versions, so be certain to choose the longest you can find, as sequences are omitted by this one, and a trickier opening can be seen in that one. Otherwise, you might miss Kenneth Branagh and Stephen Fry in crowd and ensemble scenes, with Fry one of the singers in the finale of a production of H.M.S. Pinafore the students mount. Michael Lonsdale, already a star thanks to “Day of the Jackal” and as a Bond villain in “Moonraker,” is allegedly in here somewhere, but I’ve never noticed him. Among the men of this male-dominated cast, I’d say Farrell, the embodiment of privilege and also-ran pluck who outlives most of his teammates in “Chariots,” had perhaps the most durable career, in supporting roles in the decades that followed. There he was in “The Iron Lady,” here he is in “Munich: The Edge of War.”

The Scot Charleson, who peaked with “Chariots” and a plum supporting part in “Gandhi,” died of AIDS less than ten years after “Chariots.”

Cross had a long if less stardusted than one might have hoped career. I just reviewed the last film he appeared in, a horror tale, “Prey for the Devil.”

Holm’s lovely twinkle in “Chariots” was a nice contrast to the heartless android he’d played in “Alien.” He’d eventually achieve fantasy film immortality with the “Lord of the Rings” films, returning to Tolkien as adorable Bilbo after first playing Frodo in the definitive BBC/NPR radio series back in 1979.

But Krige, who emerged from “Chariots” as a not-quite-name star, quickly established herself in horror (“Ghost Story”) and who became a fan favorite in the “Star Trek” universe, is the one player in the enterprise (ahem) who became an icon. She acted in period pieces, romances and thrillers. She was the Witch in the brilliant “Gretel & Hansel” and the title role and magnetic presence at the heart of “She Will,” she has the kind of fame that films confirm and fan conventions render immortal. Actor turned screenwriter Colin Welland went on to adapt the South African and the “Lord of the Flies” parable “War of the Buttons.” Director Hugh Hudson aslo peaked with “Chariots,” with “My Life So Far” and his last film, “Finding Altamira” far from atoning for the big budget disasters “Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan,” “Revolution,” in which he failed to wrestle America’s founding into a movie and “Lost Angels.”It was Oscar-winning producer David Puttman who went on to preside over years of prestige pictures such as “The Killing Fields” and “The Mission,” taking a shot at turning Columbia Pictures into a prestige studio in the ’80s. He failed. One common thread in stories from film magazines and trade publications from that era seemed to me, as a budding critic back then, and how resented and disliked the folks behind “Chariots” were by mainstream Hollywood. Like Harold Abrahams in “Chariots,” they were seen as “brash” and “arrogant” outsiders by the Old Guard. The notion of what “snobs” they were turned up in profiles of Puttnam and Hudson, pouring out of the pages of “Fast Fade,” a quickie “biography” of Puttnam that came after his brief run at Columbia. You can see it on the IMDb bio of Hudson, accurately labeled an “Etonian” as if that shorthand (entitled upper class Brit) could be missed by anyone. But there’s no escaping the impact of their landmark film, a game-changer for British cinema and a piece of Thatcher-era triumphalism that shifted Britain’s place in the world of film, a moment worth heralding as moment of returned glory in Sam Mendes’ semi-autobiographical “Empire of Light.”

Seen today, with all its striking, dated synthesizer music and stuffily-tolerated British classism, it’s still glorious, the sort of dreamy memory that provokes Pavlovian tears in a film fan who remembers what a stunning moment it recreates and what a wonder that the film itself was when first seen.

Rating: PG

Cast: Ben Cross, Ian Charleson, Alice Krige, Nigel Havers, Nicholas Farrell, Ian Holm, Nigel Davenport, Brad Davis, Lindsay Anderson and John Gielgud.

Credits: Directed by Hugh Hudson, scripted by Colin Welland. A Warner Bros. release on Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, Youtube and PositivTV

Running time: 2:05

Projections from Deadline and others were that “Avatar” would fall under $40 million this weekend, that “M3GAN” would open under $30, that “Puss in Boots” would manage about $10 and that “A Man Called Otto” wouldn’t clear $4.

All of those predix were torn asunder by a big, beefy Saturday (no college football, decent weather) heading into a decent Sunday.

Box Office Pro has the Top Five call and the illustration below (@boxofficepro).

“Under Her Control” is a surrogacy-gone-wrong thriller wrapped in a “Devil Wears Prada” package.

This Spanish melodrama starts slowly and lumbers towards a Big Finish that isn’t nearly big enough to atone for the tedium that precedes it.

First-time feature director Fran Torres gets a few hot sex scenes into his debut, and spills some blood in the finale. But the middle acts are one long siesta thanks to a low-stakes script (by Laura Sarmiento Pallarés) dependent upon not a whole lot happening.

Cumelen Sanz plays Sofia, an ambitious sales clerk at a Madrid bargain fashion store with dreams of interning and then working for the great Beatriz Gaya (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) a self-made Madrileña fashion tycoon.

Sofia is a devout, superstitious Catholic from Colombia not shy about dropping in on her Colombian beau, Nacho (Alex Pestrana) at the various rental properties he shows to prospective renters.

It’s not just siestas that Spaniards take over the noon hour.

Sofia’s fervent prayer comes true and she lands the internship as Beatriz’s assistant. But just as she’s learning the ropes and starting to get her ideas “out there,” all that unprotected sex comes home to roost.

She can’t tell Nacho. The priest she consults just shames and threatens her that “There is no worse crime than spilling the blood of the innocent!”

Meanwhile, single, 50ish Beatriz has figured out that her careerism and years of “swipe right” level relationships have run out her biological clock.

“By the time you know what you want, you’ve no time left,” she sighs (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) to her OB-GYN (Vanessa Rasero).

All it takes is her picking up on Sofia’s “condition” and the young woman’s desire to get out of it for Beatriz to spring into action, and enlist her gyno-pal and her lawyer (Pedro Casablanc) in the scheme.

They will manipulate and bribe Sofia, tricking her out of an abortion, plotting to separate her from Nacho during the pregnancy, keeping everything secret so that the baby can be passed off as belonging to Beatriz.

For all their machinations, they should take heed when Sofia brazenly asks for double their offer and a contract guaranteeing future employment. She’s not some naive waif, fresh off the boat from South America.

But she finds herself “Under HER Control” when Beatriz parks her in a country estate with no phone, where CCTV cameras will watch her every move and her health regimen will be strictly monitored.

And then the pregnancy progresses, hormones kick in and the real games begin.

The plot has dopey, obvious contrivances designed to make all of this plausible, which they don’t.

The performances are on low simmer as the characters turn towards sinister or allegedly desperate, and do nothing to engage us in the proceedings.

And the payoff is flat, with even the violence failing to up the heartrate as it supposedly ups the ante.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, Cumelen Sanz, Vanesa Rasero, Pedro Casablanc and Alex Pestrana.

Credits: Directed by Fran Torres, scripted by Laura Sarmiento Pallarés. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:50

The sort of simple, indulgent reveries you could find on TV variety shows back in their Golden Age, turning over the camera and six minutes of your show to Orson Welles to improvise his way up to Sir John, Shakespeare’s lines long committed to memory. This is from about 1968, a few years after Welles’ Falstaff film, “Chimes at Midnight,” one of the many Welles TV appearances preserved on Youtube.

You didn’t have to grow up in the ’70s, travel to America’s major cities back then to know what the decade looked like. And that was largely due to films lit and photographed by Owen Roizman.

The director of photography of the overcast natural-light-fixated “French Connection,” the malaise and gloom of “Network,” the existential fear of the dark of “The Exorcist,” the gaudy showbiz “West” of “The Electric Horseman,” the seedy side of SoCal of “Straight Time,” — “Black Marble,” “The Taking of Pelham One, Two Three” — he practically defined the on-screen look of the decade.

And when the “national malaise” mood was shifted by the delusional optimism of the ’80s, he was right there lighting it — “Tootsie,” “True Confessions,” “Absence of Malice,” “Vision Quest.”

He worked with Lawrence Kasdan on comedies and “Grand Canyon,” shot Westerns (“Wyatt Earp”) and musicals (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”).

Roizman’s the guy the cinematographer-turned-director Barry Sonnenfeld trusted to know the right “funny lens” to use for “The Addams Family.”

Roizman was one of the great ones, and never won an Oscar. Nominated five times and never won. You don’t always know who is defining the light, look and tone of a decade on Eastmancolor (Kodak), Fuji, Afga when they’re doing it.

Roizman made it to the ripe old age of 96. Well done all around, sir.

Egyptian action auteur Peter Mimi is no stranger to Hollywood blockbusters. You don’t have read or watch interviews with him to have that confirmed. It’s right there on the screen.

The latest from the director of “No Surrender” is a robot-as-revenge thriller that takes from “The Terminator” and imitates, in ways both obvious and subtle, the story beats, action tropes and trendy vehicles popular in La La Land action cinema of the moment.

“Mousa” is about a meek, bullied engineering student named Yehia (Kareem Mahmoud Abdel Aziz) who can’t even summon the courage to stand up to the thugs who break in, beat and rob his engineer-turned-clockmaker father (screen veteran Salah Abdullah) and set fire to their house, killing his father.

But Yehia is clever enough to design and build a nearly-unstoppable metal man to carry out his dead father’s post-mortem wish, via a vision.

“One of us had to get burned so he could light the way for the other,” father counsels, in Arabic with English subtitles. “Avenge me!”

It doesn’t matter that Yehia was kicked out of engineering school by an intemperate, classist professor (Eyad Nassar) who didn’t like the kid showing him up. It’s not important that Yehia can’t make much in the way of eye contact, especially with the opposite sex. And fighting? He’s the Cairo version of the proverbial “98 pound weakling.”

But let him slip on the telepathic VR helmet he uses to control the robot he named after the stillborn older brother his parents lost, and thugs, child-trafficking organ thieves and terrorists had better watch out.

This story, framed within an interrogation that comes after an opening image stripped from the film’s action climax, loses track of logic, characters and the plot in the third act. It goes completely off the rails, train-crash pun intended.

No, we never really connect the hero to his crush (Sara El Shamy) or even his more badass soulmate (Asma Abul-Yazid) for reasons that seem more due to sloppy screenwriting than Muslim cultural mores. I rewatched the last third of the film repeatedly, trying to figure out how this character turned-up in that location, that robot got on a train or who the heck this or that figure is and how they become part of what is largely a loner’s revenge-on-the-world story.

The plotting may be clumsy, the pace too slow at the start and too disorganized at the end, and the morality simplistic in the extreme. But the acting isn’t bad.

The effects are spectacular and would pass muster in any Hollywood release. If “RRR” showed the world that Indian CGI was on a par with America’s best, “Mousa” is an impressive ad for farming out some of that work to Egypt.

And then there’s what a North American might get out of watching Egyptian sci-fi action via “Around the World with Netflix.”

Mimi pays homage to “The Terminator” in several ways, including cribbing the skeletal robot walking through fire. But it’s the silly Hollywood trends and tropes that tickled me.

What do I fixate on regularly in this space, movie fans? “Cars with character.” And what does rich girl Rieka (Abul-Yazid) show up with to transport this Mousa robot to places where he’s needed — fires, so that he can rescue kids, human trafficking warehouses, etc? It’s not a Chevy Nova. No. It’s a Pontiac Ventura. That’s the Pontiac version of the Nova.

What does the college professor, whose story sidetracks the film for a bit as he has an even darker side, drive? The same thing college professors have driven in generations of Hollywood films — a Volvo.

And what do the cops and villains tangle in and chase each other with? Jeeps, with the bad guys in the evergreen Jeep Cherokee (XJ), Hollywood’s hottest “vintage” on screen car of the moment. Even in Egypt, “there is only one Jeep.”

The contortions of “Mousa’s” third act make one fret that Mimi has visions of a “franchise” on his hands, ands maybe let that distract him from a half-decent movie that loses its way at the end.

Either way, I’m looking forward to what he comes up with next. It’s obvious where he’s getting his inspirations from, and hit or miss, I for one am totally down for seeing how genre pictures and action tropes look through an Egyptian lens.

Rating: TV-14, violence

Cast: Kareem Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, Eyad Nassar, Asma Abul-Yazid, Sara El Shamy and Salah Abdullah

Credits: Scripted and directed by Peter Mimi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

You’re going to have to trust me on this. Espionage thrillers are my jam, for obvious reasons. And “escape” narratives — in books or in films — have been a passion since I was old enough to read “Who Goes Next?” or root for James Garner in “The Great Escape” on TV.

“Kompromat” is the best thriller about breaking out of Russia to come along in years. It’s a tight, tense and just-melodramatic-enough tale that will have you racing along with our flawed hero, reasoning as he does as he tries to escape a culture whose police state traditions go back centuries.

French director and co-writer Jérôme Salle has conjured up a superb entertainment, and a sobering reminder that nobody’s ever been caught breaking “into” Russia. It’s the sort of film any Westerner considering traveling there for work, “business” or whatever, should see before confirming that reservation.

People like basketballer Britney Griner and multi-national “operator” Paul Whelan and others seem to have forgotten what this riveting film’s Cold War-familiar title means. It’s a KGB coinage for manufactured “evidence” to use in whatever kangaroo court show trial they cook up if they decide The West needs to be taught a lesson through whatever tourist, athlete or business person they have at hand.

And as too many true stories that “inspired” this fictional one remind us, once they’ve got their hands on you, who knows who can get you out? Who knows who you can even trust enough to try?

Gilles Lellouche, best-known for “Tell No One” on this side of the Atlantic, plays Mathieu, a local director of the Alliance Francaise, the cultural affairs arm of the French Embassy, in remote Irkutsk, Siberia.

That outreach program has helped finance the renovation of a theater there, and his efforts have landed a local oligarch’s backing as well.

But one day, the FSB, which is just the dreaded KGB rebranded, storms in and arrests Mathieu, right in front of his little girl. He’s hooded and hauled away, hearing her screams as he does.

This begins the process of digging through his memories, trying to figure out who he crossed and what brought this on? When they tell you they’ve caught you with child pornography, that your wife has denounced you for child molestation, you know they aren’t messing around.

Was it the homoerotic dance performance he booked to reopen that theater and cultural center? Did he dance with the wrong Russian blonde that night? Was she (Joanna Kulig) a classic “honey trap?” Did his unhappy and unfaithful wife (Elisa Lasowski) pull the trigger?

Perhaps that Russian liaison in his office, Vladimir, is behind it? What about the gregarious, hard-drinking, loud-singing consulate handyman, Boris?

Can he even trust the “best lawyer in town” provided by the embassy, when the town is Irkutsk in the middle of snowy Siberia?

Mathieu is from the world of the arts, “soft” even by French standards. He’s also not the most careful guy. Fluent in Russian, he might have listened when somebody warned him that the local FSB chief was watching him. And he can’t have wholly understood that “Russian mentality is very different from the French” suggestion in the way it was intended, joining that rich benefactor for a stag hunt in wolf-infested forests, refusing to participate or even carry a gun.

This “artistic type” is shackled, tossed into a crowded prison cell where the tattooed skinheads are full of questions and threats. There are “three types of men” in there, one of them advises in his most menacing Russian (with English subtitles). “Men we respect. Men we beat. And men we f—.” Which will Mathieu be?

Even removal from that environment, after the pre-ordained beating by the inmates, is no picnic. He is under house arrest, with “no outside contact” allowed — no phone, no Internet.

At least he’s now got the solitude, limited freedom of movement, and wherewithal in this bugged-and-watched house to consider his lawyer’s whispered advice.

“If you have the guts, escape.”

“Kompromat” is another thriller that makes my oft-repeated point that what is most exciting and engaging in such movies is seeing an EveryWoman or EveryMan try to use what little they know about such dilemmas to try and reason, scheme and fight their way out of this type of fix.

The phrase “ex-special forces” has become the lazy screenwriters’ best friend. The explanation “very particular skills” should have been retired once Liam Neeson used it in “Taken.” It’s become a cliche.

Mathieu is” Jason Bateman in “Ozark,” Redford in “Three Days of the Condor,” the grieving snowplow operator played by Stellan Skarsgaard from “In Order of Disappearance” or stricken husband Russell Crowe, desperate to free his imprisoned wife over “The Next Three Days.” He has no “particular skills.” But Mathieu does have the wherewithal to know how much he can accomplish if he can score a phone, if he can secretly access the Internet.

The screenplay by Caryl Ferey and director Salle (“Anthony Zimmer” was his, and he scripted the Hollywood espionage flop “The Tourist) has creative problem solving, surprise twists and plenty of melodramatic touches as our clumsy but not stupid hero takes his shot at escape.

Igor Jijikine is the very face and bald pate of Russian villainy as the Spetsnaz tracker brought in to find our fleeing political pawn.

There are interpersonal intrigues with the Russian Svetlana and political ones with the French ambassador, as this story is set between Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea and its current attempt at “territorial expansion.”

The West always frets over “Russian relations.” The boozy once-and-future Bolsheviks have no such qualms.

Lellouche deftly navigates all this as a man just careless enough to make us shout “What are you DOING?” at times, even as we marvel at just how much “freedom” one can achieve, just through ride shares, social media, online AirBnB bookings and that modern mode of liberation, the cell phone.”

No wonder totalitarians and their pet South African oligarchs fear our “all access” tech. In this day and age, the most useful gadgets aren’t from “special branch” and whoever supplies the Impossible Mission Force. They’re from the Genius Store, or greet us with a helpful “Hello, Moto!”

“Kompromat” settles for a few easy ways out of this or that situation, and takes a few “compromised” steps. But it’s a first rate thriller, more cerebral than Tom-Cruise-does-his-own-stunts, and all the more engaging for it.

Lellouche and Salle allow us to sprint in Mathieu’s sodden shoes, identify with his plight and imagine we have the wits to attempt the impossible as he does, or even have the guts to.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Gilles Lellouche, Joanna Kulig, Elisa Lasowski, Aleksey Gorbunov, Michael Gor and Igor Jijikine

Credits: Directed by Jérôme Salle, scripted by Caryl Ferey and Jérôme Salle A Magnet/Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:06

Universal/Blumhouse/Atomic Monster’s killer-doll thriller “M3GAN” is in the process of premiering in the top tier of where horror movies typically land on opening weekend — a $26-28 million dollar rollout on the always-sleepy first weekend of January.

Nothing of note has opened since “Avatar: The Way of Water” came out before Christmas, and pent-up demand and great word of mouth for a thriller that plays, even if the frights are a bit thin and the leading lady’s a stiff, is making bank.

“Avatar” will win the weekend, racking up another $37 million or so, sayeth Deadline.com. By Midnight Sunday, it will have cleared the $500 million mark, just domestically. Another “King of the World” moment for Mr. Cameron.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” is cleaning up as family audience fare, an entertaining cartoon that will collect another $10 million or so this weekend and probably clear the $100 million mark next weekend.

“A Man Called Otto” didn’t collect great reviews, but the Tom Hanks fanbase is still showing up — if in small numbers (less than 700 theaters have it this weekend) and it should mange $3.5 million or so on its first weekend in wider release.

“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is winding down its run in the top 5 with another $3-$3.2 million weekend.

“Babylon” is hanging around, doing $1.3 million in business and praying — probably in vain — for an awards season/Oscar noms bounce that just isn’t coming. Another $1.3, it sits at $13 million or so by Sunday night and may not clear the $20 million mark before it loses most of its screens.

For a while, at least, I was thinking somebody dropped the ball with this domestic horror “comedy” “Who Invited Them.”

“This is good enough to have played in theaters,” I said to myself, noting how a good cast does well playing two couples who act out manipulations, show widening strains in a marriage and play into a night that just won’t end because one couple won’t go home after the cocktail party’s over.

I mean, sure, the foreshadowing’s so obvious that you’d have to be deaf to not pick up on where writer-director Duncan Birmingham’s debut feature is headed — eventually. But there’s still some mystery about what distractions pop up along the way, how the evening might just “get interesting” after a lot of booze, a little “booger sugar” and pressure to stay up late, do more coke and maybe…swing?

But this short-but-not-particularly-brisk thriller delivers smirks, not laughs and intrigues, not frights. There are structural problems and badly worked-in red herrings that make the final act quite the little letdown.

Still, let’s accentuate the positive first. Ryan Hansen of TV’s “Veronica Mars” and Melissa Tang “The Kominsky Method”) click as a Adam and Margo, a couple with a little boy, a new-to-them house “in The Hills” overlooking LA, and a few issues they’re not really dealing with.

He’s trying to entertain a generally reluctant klatch of colleagues at a not-quite-house-warming, and she’s avoiding all of them by hanging out with her cook-friend in the kitchen.

But as Adam toasts and welcomes one and all “our friends,” he can’t help but notice these two good-looking strangers. Who are they? Friends of Margo? Nope.

As the house empties out, they compare notes on “that super slick couple” who look like they’re “dressed for a sexy funeral” and wonder who they might be.

Why not ask them yourselves? They haven’t left. They were in a bathroom...together.

All the awkwardness that entails is struggled through as we meet Tom (Timothy Granaderos of “13 Reasons Why”) and Sasha (Perry Mattfeld of “Shameless” and “In the Dark”). They’re very cool. They’re very pretty. They’re “the neighbors.”

Of course we don’t buy that, even if Margo and Adam do. Kind of.

They manage to finagle a last drink and talk Adam into putting some vinyl on the turntable. And then, either as a foursome — all in the same room — or breaking up into “Let me help you with that” guy-guy/woman-woman pairings, the strangers start tugging at fissures in this marriage, poking at the sore spots. The party hosts fall right into that trap.

That’s the most interesting part of “Who Invited Them,” the relationship dynamics and the ways Margo and Adam are manipulated into going for each other’s throats.

But the Big Clue has been delivered and the story slides, and then stumbles a bit as it makes that turn towards the denouement, where all our suspicions bear fruit and yet nothing all that scary happens.

The violence is unpleasant, with a little added dash of sad and disturbing. It feels both inevitable and shoehorned-in. We believe in the menaced couple, but the ease with which they’re baited keeps us from rooting for them.

And the finale seems like an incomplete cheat.

Still, it’s good enough to at least make one wish all involved the best, “better luck next time” and all that. It’s just that the first hour had one hoping for a lot more than a consolation prize.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity and innuendo

Cast: Ryan Hansen, Melissa Tang, Perry Mattfeld and Timothy Granaderos.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Duncan Birmingham. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:21