Movie Nation

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

A French diplomat faces State Security skullduggery in 2017 Siberia.

Looks flinty and nerve wracking.

A Jan 20 release from Magnet/Mangolia

Every movie set during the Holocaust has some merit, especially those based on historical accounts of survivors. Anyone who lived through that needs to be celebrated, and those who didn’t must be remembered.

But not all concentration camp dramas are created equal.

“The Champion,” originally titled “The Champion of Auschwitz,” is about Polish boxer and “Inmate #77” at the death camp, Tadeusz “Teddy” Pietrzykowski, a Warsaw bantamweight imprisoned for fleeing the occupied country to re-join the Polish Army in exile. He survived the camps by fighting for the entertainment of the German Nazis. He was lionized in Poland and has been the subject of books and films there.

But one suspects the reason the Poles have venerated his story is at least in part because he wasn’t Jewish. And this facile, cliched and grievously limited-in-scope film biography doesn’t do him, his real story, the real tragedy or this genre of film any justice.

Pietrzykowski’s story is worth retelling because the real life details of it are fascinating and often inspiring, and because it’s worth remembering that the mass incarceration and slaughter widely known as The Holocaust wasn’t just about Jewish genocide.

Writer-director Maciej Barczewski’s debut feature looks right but never feels anything but contrived. He traffics in tropes, and trips himself up on details, glibly skipping through this story with seemingly the thinnest understanding of the real history and the facts of the event he’s working with.

A working “death camp” with “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (“Work Makes You Free”) over its front gate doesn’t have its officers and functionaries bellowing “There is no exit other than through the chimney of the crematorium” to its new inmates.

Yes, they were sadists, evil on an almost inhuman level. But blurting that out, how would they keep order? Arrivals would freak out and probably even riot at times. Even the illusion of “showers” would be shattered and every single operation of the camp would be compromised and rendered much more difficult to manage.

We see the myth of the “urbane, cultured Nazi” officer trotted out for the umpteenth time, and watch SS officers and their families — overdressed swells — sitting in the snowy cold of a Polish winter watching an inmate — who should be shivering — give an OUTdoor winter piano recital.

Scene after scene here rings false, or at least hard to defend with facts.

Our boxer (Piotr Glowacki) tries to keep his head down, and being “the dodge king of Warsaw,” an expert at avoiding blows, has to help. But his background and skill are discovered in the most trite way, and he befriends the beefy, bullying but also imprisoned German capo (Piotr Witkowski) who used to be a boxer as well, and who becomes t”he champion’s” champion.

“We’ll fatten him up and he’ll fight the best boxers!”

Why do the Nazis listen to this Walter? Why is this German imprisoned at Auschwitz, as we’re never told? Why have a dwarf as ringmaster/bout announcer? Why stray so far from the simple, more colorful facts of Pietrzykowski’s story in grasping for an “entertaining” and “uplifting” concentration camp film?

The cruelty, summary executions, starvation and presence of death all around those imprisoned there are established facts about such places and recreated here. A Nazi officer who makes inmates who have “stolen” apples put them on their heads before he shoots them, but who spares those who, unprompted, quote Schiller’s “William Tell” to him? Give me a break.

One accepts death camp movies on their level when possible. Even “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” had merits and pathos and made you feel something.

For all its vivid recreation of the era and the grim physical realities of the camps, its mostly solid and credible performances, “The Champion” fails at almost everything else important to any movie that tackles this subject.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Piotr Glowacki, Jan Szydlowski, Marianna Pawlisz, Grzegorz Malecki, Marcin Czarnik and Piotr Witkowski

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maciej Barczewski. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

This Jan 27 B-movie release has a battle-tested villain, Arnold Vosloo, with Jacob Keohane as the lead, and Jackson Rathbone, Michael Ironside, Bruce Davison and Jorge Garcia in the supporting cast.

And it features James Urbaniak as…HIMMLER?

Now we’re getting somewhere.

P.T. Barnum was 60 when he first took his “emporium,” oddities exhibition and giant circus on the road in 1870. William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his “Wild West Show,” with its cast of several hundred people, hundreds of horses and a small herd of buffalo, debuted and hit the road in 1883.

And while Barnum was practically the inventor of “ballyhoo” and hype, and was the first to proclaim he was putting on “The Greatest Show on Earth,” anyone alive in the late 19th and early 20th century who saw both spectacles might beg to differ. “The Greatest Showman” is a matter of some debate.

There were few spectacles outside of the Roman Colosseum to rival the “Wild West Show,” a grand, chaotic pageant of “the taming of the frontier,” with famous cowboys, famous Indians, sharp shooters, lawmen and trick riders by the score.

And if there’s one thing filmmaker Robert Altman was known for in those heady days of his “M*A*S*H” to “Popeye” peak, it was pageants — sweeping, overpopulated tableaux of Americana that said something about the American psyche.

America’s politically-dubious modern wars to America’s “HealtH” fads, country music conservativism to the American way of “Wedding,” if it had a big theme and a lot of actors willing to play all the moving parts, Altman was in. It wasn’t the only sort of film he’d make over the course of his career, but it why we remember him, and how he bowed-out, with one last all-star spectacle, “A Prairie Home Companion,” in 2006.

“Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson” was an ambitious attempt to recreate the man, the myth-making and one of the defining spectacles of what people back then, and in the film, called “The Show Business.”

It’s got Paul Newman in the title role, with Joel Grey playing Bill’s partner, producer and “MC” of course. The big themes are the myth that was already settling in about the country’s noble struggle to “tame” the frontier, about the Natives slaughtered and displaced by that, the wildlife and ecosystems nearly wiped out, historic American racism and how all of that could be encapsulated in a single Big Show.

The film, which I must’ve seen in part or as a whole a dozen times on TV as it was a cable staple in the ’80s, never quite comes off. Nobody describes it as their favorite Newman film or the best of Altman. But channel surfing by a Buffalo Bill documentary sent me down the rabbit hole of wondering which towns I’ve lived in hosted “Wild West Show” visits while it was touring, and curious enough to make me want to see this 1976 epic again.

Homeless teens leave the mean streets of Medellin for the promise of a far-off plot of land in “The Kings of the World,” director and co-writer Laura Mora Ortega’s dark, picaresque odyssey through Colombia’s half-abandoned interior.

It’s a dreamlike journey into the hopes of reckless, under-educated kids who have nothing but each other, that piece of land and their “freedom.” And their concept of that seems borrowed from Kris Kristofferson, “just another word for ‘nothing left to lose.'” That’s what sends this broke, oft-injured and sometimes-quarrelsome quintet on their quixotic quest.

Ortega, who directed the gritty crime drama “Killing Jesus,” introduces these lads in their element in a opening act of nervous energy filmed with a jarring hand-held camera.

Bryan Andre, “Ra” (Carlos Andrés Castañeda) is 19, living on the streets, pilfering and begging and hustling, the magnet for several friends who ride busted, chainless and DIY modified “coasting” bikes, three-to-a-seat, as they look out for each other and keep each other company.

There’s safety in numbers, they must think. Because the lives of homeless kids like them are the cheapest of the cheap. Any bravado they think they’re showing by their mock machete fights won’t do them much good when they’re out of their element.

But that’s where these “Kings of the World” (“Los reyes del mundo”) are headed when Ra gets a letter from the national Land Restitution Agency. His late grandmother’s claim that she was involuntarily and illegally “displaced” from her home in rural Nechi has been heard and granted.

Ra’s dream of “a place” for them to live and make something of themselves and “be free” is coming true. Sere (Davison Florez), Nano (Brahian Acevedo) and Winny (Cristian Campaña) are up for this trek in an instant.

They don’t really know where Nechi is or how long it’ll take to get there. They’re not exactly rolling in cash. But hey, they have their bikes.

Before they can go, a first sign of trouble. Their in-again/out-again “friend” and supposed relative Culebra (Cristian David Duque) storms up full or threats and accusations. No, they’re not trying to “ditch” him. Sure, he can come.

There’s not much point in pleading the case that “SOMEone should offer Michael Jai White better roles” any more. He’s all but given up on that himself, and is back to writing his own vehicles.

White, always and forever “Black Dynamite,” proves just as bad at whipping up a decent story for his muscle-bound martial artist persona as anybody else with “As Good as Dead.”

It’s a stumbling, illogical and silly genre thriller that calls attention to its tropes and its shortcomings, and not in a fun “Black Dynamite” (White also scripted that) way.

A former agent “hiding out in Olde Mexico” thriller of the “We’re in Mexico, so every character we meet speaks English” variety, it features a script that has our hero tell his “story” — in detail to a new acquaintance — only to have them start arguing about which Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, Stallone or whoever picture that “story” sounds like.

“Raid 2?” Hell no. “Rambro?” OK, maybe that floats.

That “story” opens with our man on the down-low in Mexico, working on a road surveying crew and not speaking any Spanish. Apparently. Not that he stands out or anything.

Every morning, he strips that shirt off to go through his martial arts workout with his DIY kicking/training post (with car tires), noting only in passing that this skinny Mexican teen (Luca Oriel) is on the hill behind his travel trailer home, mimicking those moves.

Oscar is bullied. Oscar has a brother in prison. Oscar needs to know how to fight. Mr. Davis takes him under his beefy wings.

“When you get hit first?” he recites, “It’s my fault,” Oscar responds.

Bloody nose from a punch? “Never wipe it in battle! It’s a sign of weakness!“

One easy martial arts training montage later, and Oscar is whining about “competition,” which Davis dismisses.

But when brother Hector (Guillermo Iván) gets out of prison, Oscar takes on a big bruiser at a bareknuckle prize fighting competition, Cobra Kai’s a guy three times his size, and gets on youtube.

That’s how the bad men in LA — the golfing goon (Louis Mandylor) and corrupt and imprisoned ex-cop (Tom Berenger) find out where “Davis” is. Because “nobody else fights light that. And they want to get even with the big man South of the Border.

“Renfield?” He’s got issues. He’s in a support group.

Can they work these toxic workplace issues out? April 14, we’ll see.