Movie Nation

A moment, if you please, for one last bow and sword-sweeping flourish from Antonio Banderas in the guise of perhaps his greatest screen creation, that swashbuckling catnip-to-the-kitties and the kiddies, Puss-in Boots.

The star of “Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish” is so glorious in the part that I’d put the Most Special Spaniard right up there with Robin Williams as giving one of the finest vocal characterizations ever to grace an animated film.

“PRAaaaaaay for mercy from… Puss in Boots!”

With every verbal curlicue, every sexy growl, every rrrrrollled R, the man makes this Dreamworks version of the fairy tale figure a work of art and a tutorial in committing to the character with the best instrument in your acting tool kit — your voice. Banderas brings it in every scene, with every line, as if this is the audition that will make him. As if he wasn’t already a legend.

For his third outing as the the cavalier cat burglar, Banderas and a star-studded ensemble including Salma Hayek (Kitty Softpaws), Florence Pugh (Goldilocks), Oscar-winner Olivia Colman (Mama Bear), Ray Winstone (Papa Bear) and John Mulaney (plum on his thumb Jack Horner) fight with or help the cat cope with his fear of mortality, fear of commitment and ego as Puss stares death right in the face…and runs like a scaredy cat.

The film throws our hero into another epic “I LAUGH at death!” throw-down with a giant whose peace he disturbed with his latest self-celebratory fiesta. But his big finish doesn’t lead to another serving of his favorite dish, “gaassssssssssss-pacho.” Puss gets good and conked.

And the town veterinarian has some bad news for him. He’s used up all but one of his “nine lives.” He’s told to retire. But but… “A legend NEVER dies!” Or so he’s always believed.

When a sinister wolf (Wagner Moura, terrific) shows up in a hooded cloak, armed with scythes, Puss finds himself literally fighting for his life for perhaps the first time in his life.

He runs off to live out his days sans hat, sword and boots with a cat lady (Da’Vine Joy Ranolph, a hoot) and her ever-growing brood. The nameless outcast mutt (Harvey Guillén) who disguises himself as a cat just to have a home, only knows him by his Puss’s new name, Pickles. “Puss” must disappear forever, as he grows his beard, eats and eats, learns to use a litterbox and probably wishes the producers had bought the rights to “Memory” for him to sing.

When it comes to Byzantine scheming and plots, those ancient Eastern Roman Imperialists had nothing on the Japanese yakuza.

The back-stabbing, front-stabbing, neck-snapping, hit-man/hit-woman intrigues of the new thriller “Hell Dogs” bears that out. It’s a movie of huge, murderous gangs and undercover cops killing their way to the top of them, of betrayals and corrupt Christian cults tied to “far right American politics,” of drugs and prostitution and ivory smuggling and homoeroticism.

And if it doesn’t simply wear you out, it’s not for lack of trying. The opening act’s mountain of exposition, skipped-through backstory and tsunami of names of mobsters and molls and allegiances and complications are a LOT of clutter to plunge through, especially on a movie Netflix hasn’t gotten around to creating an English language soundtrack for.

Lots and lots of subtitles, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

It’s damned near impossible to figure out who is relating to whoever and wherever this unwieldy beast is set.

But focus on the performance of Jun’ichi Okada, who has aged out of his J-pop years into a properly grizzled screen samurai, cop or brawler who punches above his (modest) height. He is a riveting presence who holds this movie together when it is talking and back-storying us to death, just the guy you want to answer the question “Why?” near the end.

“You want the long or the short version?”

We meet him as an unassuming, muscular slob strolling into a rural chicken farm, identifying a former yakuza (Japanese mafia) killer named “Mad Dog.” He’s there to expose, confront and with a shrug, suggest “You must atone” for that tattooed body-count of kills inked onto his arm.

But the guy making this suggestion has a body-count tattoo, too. Mad Dog never knew what hit him.

It turns out this avenger’s name is Goro Idezutsi (Okada), and he used to be a cop nicknamed “G.I.” He’s long off the force, just a man wandering the land like a samurai, settling scores. An undercover unit’s chief (Yoshi Sakô) grabs him, shames him with “No cop has fallen lower than you,” and offers him a deal — a well-paid undercover job to infiltrate one of the country’s most mob-infested regions.

They’ve got computer personality read-outs on which young made mob man he’d be best suited to partner up with, Muro (Kentarô Sakaguchi). He’s to work his way into the elite squad of the Kozu family, the Hell Dogs. He will have to kill his way to the top by wiping out “The Expelled” (outcasts forming their own gang) and bringing down those top gangsters who have gotten cozy with the police.

As “Tak,” his undercover alias, he will mix and flatter and impress Pops, Bear, Nas-Teeth, Slick and others, working his way towards towards the runway-model slim pretty boy in charge, Toako, played by pop star/actor Miyavi.

And if Pops’ woman, Emiri (Mayu Matsuoka), takes a shine to him, he’ll just have to finesse his way around that, too.

It takes a good, long while for this narrative to weed through the early slaughter — a prologue that sets-up what is being avenged — and get to a point where it’s lean enough to grasp. But the charismatic Okada drags us along as we see double and triple crosses, mass murder and fights involving all sorts of ordnance — a 1935 Manville revolver shotgun, for instance, just the thing you want when you’ve become this or that boss’s bodyguard and they’ve wandered into an abandoned factory trap, with platoons of rival gangsters storming in, wearing face shields and rain slickers to keep from getting all splattered with blood as they shotgun everyone in sight.

“Hell Dogs” is a deep dive into yakuza genre thrillers, featuring locations Westerners never see (ruined bottling plants, etc), exotic, pimped wing-doored SUVs that Japan doesn’t export and police ethics (killing your way through a mob) not common in Western cinema and Western policing.

Writer-director Masato Harada (“Baragaki: Unbroken Samurai”) and his fight choreographers manage to up the ante, brawl after brawl, shootout after shoot-out. These escalate, sometimes in scale — sheer numbers — sometimes in simple shock-value and intensity. One involving a hit-woman made my jaw drop.

It’s not a film for the faint-hearted, with torture and yakuza finger-lopping and fights to the death so intimate we feel the high stakes and desperation.

But it’s also goofy. The gangsters speculate on Toake’s sexuality. I mean, who wouldn’t? But there’s no judgement here, because when you’re naked around other guys so much you’ve memorized their full body tattoos, who knows who swings which way? You’d be surprised. You will be surprised.

Mobsters, as in accurate depictions of their “class” in other countries, are seen as gauche, callous and stupidly careless. One higher-up makes his karaoke choices straight out of the Andrea Bocelli songbook. Another drags his wife onstage to duet the workers of the worlds anthem, “L’Internationale.” Damned commie. Probably Chinese. These yakuza have their fingers in lots of countries and all sorts of illicit trade.

“Hell Dogs,” whose full title is “Hell Dogs: In the House of Bamboo,” is a lot to take in and a movie that takes too long to give us our bearings.

But our tour guide through it all is the dogged, scowling, undeterred Tak, aka “G.I.,” a hard man with a secret inside of a ploy buried behind a bigger secret. Okada’s violent world-weariness in the part makes this guy the only one who, in mid-slaughter, can give anybody on screen or off, the answer to “why” all this is going on.

“You want the long or the short version?” Let’s take the long one and see how often it makes our jaws drop.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity, profanity

Cast:Junichi Okada, Kentaro Sakaguchi, Mayu Matsuoka, Miyavi and Yoshi Sakô

Credits: Scripted and directed by Masato Harada, based on a novel by Akio Fukamachi. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:18

The early 20th century Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig has had a pretty good run when it comes to adaptations of his work into film.

His novella, “Letter from an Unknown Woman” became one of the great screen romances and one of the loveliest films ever shot in black and white thanks to Max Ophüls’ 1948 treatment. Scores of his books and stories have become films, his play “Volpone” has been filmed several times, and Wes Anderson gave him a deserved “inspired by” credit for his glorious “Grand Budapest Hotel.”

When you write compact, moving and atmospheric novels filled with pithy dialogue, filmmakers will beat a path your door.

His symbolic and moving psychological drama “Chess: A Novel” was filmed as “Chess Story,” titled “The Royal Game” when it was released in Europe. It’s a showcase of the film-friendly glory that was Zweig, a lush period piece about Vienna as the Nazis takeover, a cryptic story of money, character, guilt and chess. And as our hero, the Viennese Dr. Bartok lets us hear, it is damned quotable.

“As long as Vienna keeps dancing, the world can’t end,” he purrs in (subtitled) German to his wife, Anne, on the ballroom dance floor. “Vienna survived the Turks. It’ll survive the Germans.”

Dr. Bartok, played by Oliver Massuci of “Look Who’s Back,” a Hitler-mocking comedy, and a member of the “Fantastic Beasts” universe, is a rich, entitled man headed for a great fall. But even after all he goes through, he retains his wit.

“You must be either very proud or very wealthy,” a stranger wonders.

“I used to be both.”

The framing device is an ocean voyage, passengers boarding a liner from Rotterdam, bound for America. A shellshocked Bartok meets his loving wife (Birgit Minichmayr) as they’re about to clear customs. She prattles on but he has a hard time summoning anything to say.

“How was it ‘back then?'” he asks, and she reassures him of the glories of pre-war Vienna. Their fellow passengers appear to be swells, the “dress for dinner” type. But in their spartan cabin, Josef, traveling under the name “Max,” is taken back to 1938, the day of The Anschluss.

Josef’s newspaper headlines a call for everyone to vote “No” on the referendum to be held that week on merger with Germany. He and Anne dress for a gala, but the drive to the grand ballroom is fraught as their Mercedes limo is surrounded by torch carrying, marching Nazis, screaming their contempt at the rich, a rabble who needs “someone to blame for their hunger,” Josef notes.

But surely they’re not the majority. Surely Austria won’t vote…

Bartok’s friends and associates that night all call him by his nickname, “The Notary,” as he and his circle of peers — many Jewish, it is implied — joke about the Nazi regime and its leaders.

But one friend (Lukas Miko) warns him of the dire things to come, and within hours. “The Notary” is in the act of burning his papers when he is taken.

We learn what that nickname means when the urbane, well-dressed goon (Albrecht Schuch) takes him into custody at Vienna’s finest hotel, with Bartok still in his formal wear.

The good doctor is an asset manager, the son another of such advisor/investor. The fortunes of Vienna’s most fortunate are in secret accounts abroad in his care, and only Bartok can tell the Germans how to get to them.

Meanwhile, on the ship, Bartok as “Max” is making a scene, drinking too much and interfering in a series of speed-chess matches with the “world champion,” a bearded, disheveled and illiterate mute from Hungary, his manager insists. Somehow Bartok, who once dismissed the game his interrogator asked him about as “a pastime of bored Prussian generals,” found the time to master it.

“Chess Story” is how that came to be, and how it will figure into this voyage.

“Chess Story” was directed by Philipp Stölzl, the Bavarian filmmaker known for such period pieces as “North Face” and “Young Goethe.” He was entrusted with turning Noah Gordon’s popular novel of Medieval Europe and a medically curious young Westerner who poses as a Jew to study at the feet of a famed Persian physician, and made a gorgeous Ben Kingsley/Stellan Skarsgaard showcase, “The Physician” out of it. This story is in safe if not exactly the most-celebrated hands.

Here, he and screenwriter Eldar Grigorian maintain a disorienting sense of mystery as to what’s really going on. Bartok is kept in that Hotel forever. The later sea voyage seems oddly out of time, literally so, as Bartok seeks clocks spinning backwards.

And the chess that he loses himself in is as much a mark of madness — in melodramas like this — as it is genius.

Masucci cagily plays Bartok as a broken man with flashes of sentient outrage in the shipboard scenes, and as a man of principles and stubborn loyalty in the flashbacks, not quite haughty, but someone used to dismissing lesser lights that trouble him, with or without those damned armbands.

The novelist Zweig isn’t necessarily parked on some pedestal of great 20th century literature, but he produced cleverly-plotted entertainments populated by flawed romantic heroes and heroines.

That’s what “Chess Story” is, mournful and just cryptic enough to leave you guessing what you just saw, but touched, engaged and intrigued by it, comfortable in realizing that over-explaining is not necessary and would spoil some of the fun.

Rating: unrated, violence, sex

Cast: Oliver Masucci, Birgit Minichmayr, Albrecht Schuch, Lukas Miko and Rolf Lassgård

Credits: Directed by Philipp Stölzl, scripted by Eldar Grigorian, based on a novel by Stefan Zweig. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:52

All those small to practically cut-out-of-the-film sized roles Nolan gave to Cillian Murphy pay off for the “Peaky Blinders” star in his chance to headline a blockbuster torn from the pages of history.

This is the trailer attached to “Avatar: The Way of Water” showings.

Very impressive, and in my mind at least, exactly the sort of film Nolan should fill the rest of his career with.

Summer release.

I love the voice acting in these kid comedies. Banderas really REALLY brings it. I mean, Oscar worthy voice acting.

Salma and Ray Winstone SINGS and Florence Pugh and Oscar winner Olivia Colman and John Mulaney and Da’Vine Joy Randolph flesh out the voice cast.

Good times. Opens Friday

Vietnamese American filmmaker Victor Vu has made dramas that Vietnam has submitted as Best International Feature Oscar contenders — “Dreamy Eyes” and “Yellow Flowers on the Green Grass.”

But his latest is a straight-up B-movie, a sci-fi action pic about what happens after a Vietnamese surgeon-researcher masters the tricky business of head transplants. Its Vietnamese title is “Lôi Báo,” but for North American import, they cut straight to the point — “Head Rush.”

And you thought Switzerland was famous for its cheese.

It’s a somewhat slack thriller notable for the novelty of its locations and some top drawer fight choreography. Veteran stuntman Vincent Wang made his mark in “Bourne” films before choreographing the action in films such as “The Great Wall” and “Now You See Me 2.”

The story? Well, it’s got comic books, comic book movie action, rich villains who want to live longer, a femme fatale and super-secret head transplants managed on what look like stripped-down tanning beds.

Tam, played by the Costanza-named Cuong Seven (“Tracer,” “The Immortal”), is an aspiring graphic novelist working on a super hero fantasy as his wife Linh (Tran Thi Nha Phuong) keeps him and their son Bu afloat running a coffee shop. His helpful Uncle Ma (Hoang Son) is always around to offer advice and literary criticism.

But we can’t help but notice Tam’s operatic cough. And what’s an operatic cough mean in the first act? In operas, it’s usually tuberculosis. In infamously cigarette-crazed Vietnam, it means “lung cancer,” even if “I’m not even 30 years old,” though we never see Tam or anybody else lighting up

Our hero’s prognosis is dire, and he races through Kubler-Ross’s stages of grief in death-and-dying, lashing out at Linh, madly trying to finish up his years-in-the-making book. But Uncle Ma offers a second opinion. Visiting his little farm and its greenhouses, Tam is shown secret beds that “are for growing humans, not just strawberries.” Uncle Ma has been doing transplant research.

Tam would rather run into the woods and hang himself, but as Uncle Ma finds him in the forest just as he’s failed, a gang shoot-out and chase stumbles by. And what does that provide? A handy fresh corpse, a brawling brute we learn is called Nghia (Vu Tuan Viet).

Next thing we know, Tam is wearing a lot of turtlenecks — to cover the gruesome scar, y’see — and has the strength to lift cars off of crash victims, parkour up the sides of buildings to rescue fire victims and punch out purse snatchers.

His kid figures dad is a new superhero

But there are memories of people as well as physical training in his new body’s cells, Uncle Ma theorizes. And those folks from that body’s past see the dude in the news and start to wonder if their old quarry Nghia has survived his shooting and had plastic surgery.

The action beats here are fun, with wirework backflips, “bullet-time” slow motion and epic gunplay, fisticuffs and knife fights thrown into the mix.

Vu includes sequences that play out wild and wacky action from Tam’s comic-book-in-progress, and there’s even a mythic action fantasy sequence that’s animated as a story Linh relates to their little boy at bedtime.

But there’s no getting around how dopey this all is, right down to the B-movie cliches that make up much of the dialogue.

“Come down and PLAY,” a henchman taunts our hero, as every hoary thriller trope save for tying his wife to the railroad tracks is trotted out.

The picture practically stops in its tracks as the middle acts limit our action to a lot of talk and a few acts of minor derring do.

With a movie like “Head Rush,” you come for the action, but usually you hope for the cheese that comes with it to be a little better than this.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Cuong Seven, Tran Thi Nha Phuong, Hoang Son, Ngoc Anh Vu, Vu Tuan Viet and Quach Ngoc Ngoan

Credits: Directed by Victor Vu, scripted by Doan Nhat Nam, Kay Nguyen and Victor Vu. A Glass House release.

Running time: 1:47

Just Cruise being Cruise, thanking “Top Gun” ticket buyers and doing his own badass stunt.

Of all the projects Netflix hurled a ton of money at “for your consideration” this awards season, “Blonde” has to be the most troubling misfire. And thanks to Netflix’s deep pockets and lax supervision, it had plenty of competition.

I’ve liked Kiwi filmmaker Andrew Dominik’s other work. “Killing them Softly” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” were two of the most interesting films Brad Pitt has lent his talent to over the years.

And who doesn’t adore Ana de Armas, the “Knives Out” breakout star?

But it’s obvious, from the two hour and 47 minute bummer that Dominik serves up, exposing and over-exposing de Armas in all her accented-but-looks-sort-of-right courage, that neither of them was right for this.

Still, “Blonde” is too ambitious and too important a cinematic subject to dismiss out of hand. Wildly uneven, misguided, bluntly exploitive at times, it also has moments of wrenching pathos and a mournful tone that will never let a film fan look at a Monroe movie the same way again.

So, well done there.

Perhaps the problem is relying on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel “Blonde” as its source material. Nobody would really want a straightforward Monroe biography, ticking off the red letter dates of the shooting star nature of her brief career, without insight, analysis and symbolic “understanding” of this fragile, damaged woman transformed into a sex symbol without peer. But Oates’ fictionalization goes too far, as does Dominik’s choice of what to emphasize and how to play it up. He begins with the moving trauma of an abused, orphaned childhood to being “discovered” and raped by Darryl F. Zanuck, beaten by husband Joe DiMaggio and cruelly and coarsely misused by John F. Kennedy.

“Daddy Issues” is the connecting thread and might be the most believable element to the film. But blending in fiction with fact — wasting all this screen time on a fictional long-running menage a trois with the bisexual sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson — feels wrong, like one last act of Marilyn abuse. Is Dominik pandering to the polyamorous audience? Cut that fiction out altogether and you’d have a shorter, sharper and at least more defensible version of who she was, and why she was.

The opening act, with Lily Fisher playing the little girl who never knew her father, and trapped in the care of a psychotic mother (Julianne Nicholson) is the most heartbreaking thing I’ve seen on a screen this year. Mom’s madness in the midst of one of those disastrous LA fires, trying to drown the child her lover wanted her to abort, you watch this and marvel how anyone survives such trauma.

It’s also brilliantly conceived and filmed, a child’s eye view of Hell, literal and figurative.

The movie skips past Norma Jeane Baker’s orphaned childhood and her first marriage and treats her pin-up girl years — nude modeling included — mostly in montage. Her meeting with “Mr. Z” (20th Century Fox chief Zanuck) implies a quid pro quo audition that becomes a rape. It could’ve happened, but Zanuck was famous for hating her and only hiring her to keep another studio from snapping her up. T

Inserting de Armas as Marilyn into “All About Eve,” the first film most people noticed her in, and later into her comic classics, “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “Some Like it Hot,” is accomplished with technincal ease. Vanessa Lemonides does the singing of “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” and other Monroe signature tunes. Playing up the little-seen “serious” breakthrough film “Don’t Bother to Knock” is insightful, as the alluring and dangerous baby-sitter Monroe plays had to be triggering to a survivor of childhood trauma.

Two casting master-strokes pay off. Bobby Cannavale brings much more personality and volatility to seemingly courtly and shy suitor and husband Joe DiMaggio. Cannavale is downright electrifying when “Daddy” flies into rages over Monroe’s nude photo past and the blatant and eager exploitation that publicly filming her skirt-billowing-over-a-subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch” entailed.

And Oscar-winner Adrien Brody brings a touching soulfulness to the playwright Arthur Miller, Monroe’s last shot at marriage, a man of art and literature and letters who is shocked, upon meeting “Norma Jeane,” at how the world is underestimating her.

That’s one of the running themes of “Blonde,” that Monroe weren’t the dizzy “sexpot” that the films that made her forced her to play. She was disturbed but in analysis, probably more skilled at character analysis than anyone gave her credit for and both a brilliant comedienne and an empathetic lead in dramas, at least the ones that let her tap into her personal tragedies.

Calling her husbands “Daddy” seemed more innocent at the time, but takes on sad undertones here. And the theme of lost childhood spilling over into lost babies (an abortion, miscarriage, grief and guilt) is played up, perhaps overplayed.

Jumping back and forth from black and white to color is kind of a wasted effect here. Dominik would have been doing the viewer a favor by lightening the mood with such shifts, or lightening the mood literally anywhere. The film’s cardinal sin is how relentlessly downbeat it is. We get little sense of what made her special. No, it wasn’t just her sex appeal.

Yes, she became too delicate to handle in her post-stardom films — calling in sick, not knowing her lines (not shown here), demanding retakes, flying into crying jags or rages. But surely there had to be tender moments when some of this sudden stardom and fame could be fun.

“My Week with Marilyn” wasn’t a lie, after all. And rewatching the adorably-dated “golddiggers at sea” romp “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” you can’t tell me the friendship that developed with co-star Jane Russell on and off screen in that production didn’t produce affectionate laughs. Jane would’ve made sure of that, and the evidence is on the screen, even if “Blonde” chooses to play up how misused Monroe felt at earning her contract minimum for a blockbuster like that, while Russell had her biggest payday.

Dominik instead accentuates the negative, making the tragedy of Monroe’s end seem inevitable. The fact that he has de Armas nude in most of the decline-and-fall third act gives the lie to some of Dominik’s protests that what Americans want and expect from a Monroe biography don’t reflect her reality.

The New Zealander didn’t “get” her, not all of her, anyway. And indulging his desire to exploit her by over-emphasizing and fictionalizing and stylizing (the NC-17 JFK encounter) the way Hollywood and America exploited her doesn’t excuse the ugliness he wallows in as he mistreats an icon who deserved better.

Rating: NC-17, violence, explicit sex, nudity, profanity

Cast: Ana de Armas, Lily Fisher, Julianne Nicholson, Bobby Cannavale and Adrien Brody, with the singing voice of Vanessa Lemonides.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Andrew Dominik, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:47

“The Stranger” is an Australian mystery that peels away its layers slowly and ever-so-deliberately. A film of sad, gloomy foreboding, it makes the viewer reach for details and wait for answers in the most elegantly calculated way.

The sense of a slow immersion in the known is so delicious that it’s almost giving away too much by even revealing the genre writer-director Thomas M. Wright is working in. But there’s no getting around the “true crime” nature of this picture, and no describing it without dipping into the police procedural tropes it leans on. Knowing that does nothing to break its spell.

Two strangers meet on a cross country bus in the dead of an Outback night. They come off as different versions of the same “type” — sketchy, down-and-out guys with pasts. But Paul (Steve Mouzakis) is somewhat more outgoing. Eventually, he gets the name “Henry” out of the bearded, soft-spoken and beady-eyed bloke opposite him.

Henry, played by the Brit character player Sean Harris of the “Mission: Impossible” movies and the Timothee Chalamet Henry V drama, “The King,” is guarded, fatalistic about how much longer a smoker with inhaler-worthy breathing problems can continue to survive by working with his hands, as he does.

Paul says he might have a hook-up. That’s how Henry meets Mark (Joel Edgerton), a bluff, all business type whose ponytail and beard and suspicious nature scream “underworld.” Henry isn’t put off by this unsolicited offer of “a bit of work” doing “a job for some people” secrecy.

“I don’t do violence,” is his only proviso.

Henry does ride-alongs with Mark, meeting people who need things, picking up a blank passport, making deliveries, accepting cash. And along the way, they strike up guarded conversations that, drip by drip, give us information on who they are and eventually what this is all about.

Actor-turned-director Wright — he did the “Acute Misfortune” Aussie artist’s bio-pic of a few years back– adds points of view as he ever-so-carefully doles out information. We hear faint and sometimes rising ringing sounds, loud enough to be remarked about by characters in the scene. We meet layers of mob hierarchy as we pick up who and what everyone is most interested in.

The police are involved, and one particular policewoman (Jada Alberts) has become obsessed with her latest case, an investigation which involves a staggering commitment of manpower and resources.

And Mark? He’s a divorced dad seriously disturbed by everything that’s going on.

Edgerton is quite good at conveying a man on the edge, trying to keep it together and not wholly succeeding. And Harris, who is right up there with Ben Mendelsohn and Dominic West when it comes to playing characters who could be anything, but deliver a creepy vibe on sight, is deliciously quiet and disturbing, letting the unkempt grey beard and shifty eyes do all the work.

But this is Wright’s show as he conjures up a movie whose every dark or overcast shot, every quiet conversion and every revelation contributes to the rising tension and the inescapable gloom tinged with grief that follows this “Stranger” — up close, and from a distance — from beginning to end.

Rating: TV-MA, smoking, profanity, violent subject matter

Cast: Sean Harris, Joel Edgerton and Jada Alberts

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thomas M. Wright. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:57

With a little help from “SNL,” singing farewell to Cecily Strong.