Movie Nation

“Nanny” is that rare sophisticated and cosmopolitan horror movie, a tale with chills and cross-cultural issues far beyond your usual nut-with-a-knife or demons menacing the kids in a cabin in the woods.

Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, an award winner at Sundance, is about a young single mother struggling to earn enough money in New York to send for her little boy back in Senegal. The separation is messing with her head, and adding African superstitions and fears onto the guilt she feels for going a year without seeing her boy in the flesh isn’t helping.

It’s a dreamy, spooky film that is sparing with its overt frights as it as much concerned with our heroine’s real world problems as it is her supernatural worries.

Aisha, played with fear and fire by Anna Diop (“Us,” TV’s “Titans”) is a regal beauty from Dakar just starting a new job. She’ll be taking care of an upper-middle class white family’s five year-old girl. Both parents (Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector) work, and keep a roomy, modern high-rise apartment with a spare bedroom for “overnights.”

Mother Amy is a hugger — warm, if a bit self-absorbed and careerist. Husband Adam is a photo-journalist who’s often away. They could really use the help. Aisha really needs the money. And they pay cash, which tells us volumes about the power dynamic in play here.

Aisha is an instant hit with their little girl (Rose Decker), a finicky eater who takes to West African cuisine that her new babysitter, caregiver and French tutor brings to work.

When Adam meets Aisha, he is friendly and impressed enough to say “I can tell you’re not going to be with us for very long.”

But Aisha is increasingly distracted at work. Her facetime chats with her boy are infrequent and frustrating. She starts to see him in her dreams and daytime hallucinations in the park, wakes up from nightmares or feels the tug of African demon mermaids, Mami Wata, trying to drown her in the pool where she takes Rose for swimtime.

She judges herself in the mirror, and worse, the independent image of her reflected back seems judgy, too.

Aisha struggles to keep it together. Maybe dating the handsome single-dad doorman (Sinqua Walls) will give her some relief. Or not. His mother (Lesley Uggams, enjoying a nice career renaissance) knows Africa and has “the sight.” She intuits much about Aisha and her state of mind, not all of which she shares.

A couple of quick observations of the Sierra Leoni filmmaker Jusu’s world-building for this film. Aisha is surrounded by overtly friendly New Yorkers. Amy lends Aisha a fancy dress so that Aisha can join a family cocktail party. Adam is complimentary and makes an effort to relate to Aisha as a woman of the world, with a ready grasp of the world she came from.

And doorman Malik to the very picture of charm and (New York) chivalry.

But Aisha is keenly aware of the power dynamics in play. Her employers are forgetful about paying her, and their marriage seems shaky. How demanding can she be? Malik has a steady job, but he’s as complicated and messy as the rest of us.

This world of affluence and off-the-tax-rolls cheap nannies gives her access to the finer things, and cash to send home to get a plane ticket for her boy. But as distracted as Aisha is and as flighty as they are, it could all go away.

No, the effects and frights aren’t the most original. But Jusu so grounds her film in this reality and so focusses our attentions on Aisha’s plight that the drama draws us in and forces us to be content with dread when the genre is knows for its jolts.

It’s no “Babadook” or “Mama,” but for a horror movie for people who won’t realize they’re watching a horror movie, it’s not bad.

Rating:  R for some language and brief sexuality/nudity.

Cast: Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Spector, Sinqua Walls and Lesley Uggams.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nikyatu Jusu. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 1:37

In the indie vampire thrilleramedy “Blood Relatives,” the anti hero travels the blue highways of America in a Fire Blue ’69 Barracuda, mutters in Yiddish and is tracked down by a teen who might be his daughter.

“I need to keep a LOW PROFILE!!”

“In your exotic cartoon muscle car that you drive around country all night?”

“It’s DOMESTIC!”

I feel…seen, and on soooo many levels.

Writer, director and star Noah Segan (he was a traffic cop in “Knives Out”) has made a generally witty and novel vampire movie, a genre I had pretty much given up on. His original twist — vampire as kvetching and kvelling car-nut Jewish dad.

The stranger in the black leather jacket only drives at night. He has a car cover he encases the ‘Cuda in if he’s trapped outside in the treeless, housing- free middle of nowhere when the sun comes up. That happens a lot, we gather. Because like any vintage Chrysler/Plymouth/Dodge product, that muscle car goes through the Mopar (parts).

But somewhere in the middle of BFE, Texas, this teenager (Victoria Moroles of TV’s “Teen Wolf”) we’ve seen stalking him in her hoodie and backpack catches up to “Francis.” Remember, he’s a very old guy in a 1950s punk guise — “You look like you dressed as Fonzie for Halloween…every day.”

What’s a Son of the Borscht Belt supposed to say to that?

“Nice Jewish boy,” that Fonzie.

Sixteen year-old “Jane” recites his rare-ish car’s specs, and he wonders “How do you KNOW that?”

“The Internet.”

“How did you FIND me?”

“The Internet.”

Ageless vampire doesn’t know from Internets, so he’ll have to take her word for it.

Her mother died. She told her daughter who her daddy was, what he drives. And between her own peculiar response to sunlight and blood and observations of the father figure she’s been stalking, Jane figured out the rest.

So, father and daughter do the vampire lifestyle, wandering and hunting and teaching her the ropes on America’s Blue Highways, with her always getting asked “You OK?” by strangers who wonder what this girl is doing with this 30something greaser in a Barracuda? Or will they move to a small town under assumed names, enroll her in school and join a single parent support group?

Which do you think is potentially funnier?

The energy flags in this lighthearted dark romp, but that happens in comedies that live and die on their snappy, shticky banter. “Blood Relatives” is still shticky enough — and sticky enough — to deliver laughs with bite.

Rating: unrated, violence, a bit of blood, adult humor

Cast: Victoria Moroles, Noah Segan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noah Segan. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:27

Amy Adams couldn’t very well turn down a sequel to “Enchanted,” the 2007 Disney delight that made the “Junebug” breakout a bonafide Hollywood star.

But seeing her soldier through “Disenchanted” makes one wish she had. She puts on her happy face and tries to make new songs and a darker direction in the story seem light on its feet. And still the sinking feeling sets in that a better title would have been “Disheartening.”

“Enchanted” was a fairy-tale mash-up musical romance that leaned into Disney Princessiana. It was a lyrical comedy most heavily indebted to “Sleeping Beauty” and a pretty young fairy tale heroine, raised with the animals of the forest, just in search of her “true love’s kiss.”

“Disenchanted,” scripted by Brigitte Hales, takes “Cinderella” as its main source. It has a mean girl who’s grown up to be an Evil Queen (Maya Rudolph). But it’s more about Adams’ Giselle, with a new baby but more importantly a rebellious teen stepdaughter (Gabriella Baldacchino) since she’s married Robert (Patrick Dempsey). When Giselle magically transforms her, her childrens’ and her husband’s new home in suburban Monroeville into a fairytale-ish “Monrolasia,” like the Andalasia Giselle grew up in, guess what Giselle turns into?

“An evil STEPmother!”

Nope. Not having it. She’s a great actress and the fact that it doesn’t work is all on the writer and on director Adam Shankman, who almost never hit the right tone, here.

New challenges, going toe to toe with the local realtor/PTA queen transformed into the Evil Queen, trying to live down being mean to her own stepdaughter, with lawyer-husband Robert forced to learn how to battle dragons and sing his own songs (not badly), new production numbers set to new songs, and none of it plays as light, amusing escapism.

This thing is a joyless chore to get through. Here’s a sample lyric from an early number, after Giselle and Robert deign to move from princess-out-of-water New York to the bucolic country.

“We’ve left behind those city lights, for riding bikes and flying kites. We will be suburbaNITES!”

“Even more ‘Enchanted?'” Well, no.

When your highlight comes in the first act, as married Andalasian royalty King Edward (James Marsden) and his New York queen, Nancy (Idina Menzel) return, you can probably see in the editing process where your movie’s gone wrong.

Their royal fairytale-land friends have moved into a Queen Anne “fixer-upper.”

“Your dwelling…you’ve become POOR now?” the king wants to know. And still a lawyer, not a “country squire?”

“A brave front is required to face a life as barren as this!”

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be.

Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But “Disenchanted” plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

Rating: PG, mild peril and profanity

Cast: Amy Adams, Patrick Dempsey, Maya Rudolph, Gabriella Baldacchino, Idina Menzel and James Marsden

Credits: Directed by Adam Shankman, scripted by Brigitte Hales. A Disney+ release.

Running time: 1:58

The mind takes conditioning to get on the right wavelength to wrestle with post-modernist social satire. We’re decades removed from screen satire’s golden age, an era roughly bracketed by two Peter Sellers films, “Dr. Strangelove” and “Being There.”

And getting a handle on writer Don Dellilo, whose breakout novel, “White Noise” brought his Hemingway meets Vonnegut, Allende, Rushie and Updike style, themes and subject matter to the wider public and great acclaim, exercises other muscles that the cinephile is rarely called on to use.

“White Noise” is now a big budget “prestige picture” from Netflix, a sprawling shock to the system that feels true to the book, and yet glib and on the whole, unsatisfying. There’s a reason this 1985 work hasn’t been filmed before now. And throwing $140 million and Noah Baumbach (“The Meyerowitz Stories, “Mistress America” and “While We’re Young”) at it explains why.

Adam Driver plays our protagonist, Dr. Jack Gladney, a middle-aged academic at The College on the Hill in bucolic Blacksmith mid America. He is “North America’s foremost expert” on Adolf Hitler.

“I teach advanced Naziism,” he cracks.

Jack is married, for the umpteenth time, to the poodle-curled Babette (Greta Gerwig, Mrs. Baumbach), and their combined families include two daughters and two sons.

Jack is an amusing collection of contradictions. He’s a rock star lecturer on campus, but a Hitler expert having to take secret German lessons from a local immigrant, because God forbid academia figure out he doesn’t know Hitler’s native tongue. He is devoted to his latest wife, but concerned and suspicious when her teen daughter from a previous marriage (Raffey Cassidy) discovers a prescription — one among many — that “Babo” is taking. Babo is becoming more and more forgetful as a result, and nobody Jack speaks to has ever heard of this drug.

Jack is obsessed with mortality, his own, and the fear that he won’t “go first,” which he expresses to his wife, who shares that fear because neither wants to be left “alone.”

But that fear of death is strangely dormant when the family and their world faces an existential and tactile threat. A railway chemical accident sends Jack’s brilliant son Heidrich (Sam Nivola) into early 80s (pre-Internet) research and threat-identifying (and fear-mongering) overdrive.

“The Airborne Toxic Event” is coming, and only Jack seems unwilling to grasp the emergency at hand.

No, we weren’t paranoid about the Zombie Apocalypse in the ’80s. But we did have a flippant, shallow, draft-dodging actor in the White House prone to “limited nuclear war” wisecracks. And we didn’t yet live in a media environment that allowed for easy dismissal or gaslighting away disasters in the making, either.

We trusted “authority,” be it governmental or media.

The family, society and culture will be tested by this disaster and the “White Noise” of modern life, and unravel a bit before the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” ethos of the day bubbles up.

I love the quick-stroke skewering of academia that Baumbach scatters through the opening scenes. Don Cheadle, playing Dr. Murray Siskind, an expert on the morphology and and meaning of car crashes in American cinema — and Elvis — lands many of the movie’s biggest laughs, and the occasional searing insight.

“We are fragile people surrounded by hostile facts.”

One bravura sequence comes when Murray summons Jack to his Elvis class as moral support in his battle to protect his turf within whatever quirky umbrella heading their “department” lives under. They engage in a funny, complimentary rap-battle lecture, pointing out the similarities of two of the 20th century’s most famous and infamous “mama’s boys,” Der Fuhrer and The King.

Every scene’s soundtrack is layered with inquisitive kid-questions, chatty commentary, lively debate and ennui not borne in silence.

It’s when the “Airborne Toxic Event” hits that this noisy mayhem is muted, and then whipped to a crescendo as Baumbach creates a “World War Z” level cacophony of chaos — mass, manic evacuation, citizens herded into a Boy Scout camp, officialdom treating this murderous emergency like “an exercise” while all those concentrated into this one place tune in to their radios and bulky portable TVs, desperate for information, furious — as one evacuee, played by Bill Camp notes — at the way the country and the world are ignoring and forgetting them already.

Scenes like that animate the film, and yet underscore the most lethal two-word takedown of DeLillo’s choice of themes, and his style — he also novelized reactions to Lee Harvey Oswald (“Libra”) and the Cold War (“Underworld”). “Hysterical realism.”

The performances here aren’t particularly affecting, as Baumbach treats even the serious issues and pointed social commentary as cartoonish. I mean, he cast the one-hit-wonder singer-turned-actor Andre Benjamin as a fellow academic and does a Bollywood/Gurinder Chadha dance-off bringing the entire cast into the gaudy sanctity of the Blacksmith A & P for the closing credits.

Cute.

He fixates on the ugly clothes, uglier cars and forgivingly-unfit body-types of the ’80s, with Driver taking on a pot belly for his part and everybody’s hair a proto-MTV nightmare. Beyond the surface gloss, this film begs for focus, insight and meaning.

I’m afraid this is another case of Netflix’s Big Blank Check indulging a filmmaker, who cashed it and lost himself in the “White Noise” superficialities while never quite wrestling a perhaps-unfilmable novel into shape.

Rating: R, violence and (profanity)

Cast: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola, May Nivola, Jodie Turner-Smith, Andre Benjamin and Bill Camp.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Noah Baumbach, based on a Don DeLillo novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16

“Four Samosas” is a scruffy, hit or miss indie caper comedy about four young Indian Americans who set out to rob the store of a local grocer who’s gotten rich by illicit means.

It’s built on a generational angst, with a hint of cultural displacement, like a lot of Indian comedies set in North America. Writer-director Ravi Kapoor’s screenplay even references the slang acronym that became the title of one of the earliest movies in this vein — “ABCD” — which stands for “American Born Confused Deshi (person of Indian descent growing up here). “

Our hero, Vinny (Vek Potula), who runs a sari shop, is addressed thusly by his nemesis, Sanjay (Karan Soni of the “Deadpool” movies), who was born in India and has some sort of goat dung business there.

“Oh look, if it isn’t American Born Confused...Loser.”

Vinny has an American street argot sales patter, which does little for sari sales, but helps him in his real passion, writing and performing rap rhymes. It doesn’t help him enough to make him good at it.

He was dumped by the fair hairdresser/eyebrow threader Rina (Summer Bishil), which everyone he mentions this to reminds him was “three YEARS ago.”

Hey, “pain’s got its own clock.”

His buddy Zak (Nirvan Patnaik) runs a chaat shop, watches bad Bollywood movies and dreams of Bollywood stardom. Handsome Zak is lusted after by the “under over-achiever” Anjali (Sharmita Bhattacharya) who produces her own news brochure, The Great Little India Times, which she distributes all over Artesia, the chunk of Greater LA that’s west of Anaheim, south of LA proper.

The news that Rina is engaged to Sanjay sends Vinny into a tailspin, and he resolves to swipe the off-the-books diamonds Rina’s grocery store-owner dad (Tony Mirrcandani, a Republic of India Rip Torn) has stashed in a safe.

In classic caper comedy style, Vinny assembles his team, they don disguises and take their shot at precious jewel riches.

Indie comedies lean heavily on the Spike Lee’s Early Films model — random slices of neighborhood life and neighborhood characters decorate the seriously mundane plot.

A local “gang” of tracksuit wearing “revolutionaries” wants to declare their piece of the city The Free State of Aisetra, the 51st state and all Indian. A), “That’s Artesia spelled backwards,” Vinny points out. “And if I wanted to live in South Asia (the Indian subcontinent), I’d LIVE in South Asia!”

Many locals are all whipped up about an upcoming festival with a talent show in it. Vinny is brother-figure rapper to younger aspiring rapper cousin Nikki (Maya Kapoor), and seeks advice from a priest I take to be his father (writer-director Ravi Kapoor).

A more recent immigrant whom they recruit to help them crack the safe holding the diamonds is an Indian tech school alumna (Sonal Shah) bitter about not finding a US job and facing deporation.

The heist is visualized in fantasized classic heist movie tropes, but that sort of caper only happens in movies where four broke friends don’t have to worry about not having the money to do the job the way Tom Cruise would as Ethan Hunt.

The sources of comedy here include that colorful milieu, the oddballs who populate it and the way people with no special skills might attempt a burglary. There’s not quite enough of each on its own, but together all that adds up to a few laughs and plenty of chuckles. The picture kind of goes to pieces in the third act, but not before we’ve had a fantasized Bollywood production number — produced on the cheap — and lots of gags about haplessness, loserdom and goat feces.

These Four Samosas — the Indian potato appetizer is slang for a lot of things, including “ass” — get by on the their own ineptitude, and the fish-out-of-water clumsiness of transplanted people who don’t “fit in” any more than they need to, because it’d be a tragedy if they did.

Rating: PG-13, some profanity and “a rude gesture”

Cast: Venk Potula, Sharmita Bhattacharya, Sonal Shah, Nirvan Patnaik, Karan Soni, Tony Mirrcandani, Summer Bishil and Ravi Kapoor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ravi Kapoor. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:20

There’s real historical backdrop to “Robbing Mussolini.” But is the new Italian film (subtitled, or dubbed into English) a “true story?”

“True-ish” an opening credit reassures us. How “true-ish?”

Well, it’s 1945 Milan in the last months of the war, and everybody’s dressed to the nines. Street hustlers and smugglers have their own military communications decoding operation, and there’s easy access to weapons caches and TNT.

Their leader may call himself “Isola” (Pietro Castellitto) because “I work alone.” But he doesn’t.

And his chanteuse girlfriend (Matilda De Angelis), the one he shares with a fascist officer/torturer? Yvonne knocks’em dead every night at the club with her Italian rendition of “Paint it Black,” by Los Pietre rotolanti, aka The Rolling Stones.

Ahem.

It’s worth remembering that long before that nice Italian-American foot-fetishist Quentin Tarantino started mimicking the campy action of some corners of international cinema, that the folks over in the Olde Country, the one shaped like a boot, were showing him how it was done.

I mean, they made the original “Inglorious Bastards,” after all.

“Robbing Mussolini” is a campy WWII heist picture, a bit too violent and lacking the laughs that would make it a caper comedy, a bit too reliant on formula to give us anything new.

Isola’s usually content with selling guns and explosives to the partisans, who finally gave up on fascism and turned against Il Duce when the Allies landed in Italy. Half the country’s still in fascist hands, and Isola wants to grab his girl away from the fascist goon (Filippo Timi) who keeps her around to cheat on his fading film star wife (Isabella Ferrari)

What’s the theatrical, vampy fading screen star’s name? Nora, because “Norma” was taken.

To make their getaway in style, Isola needs Mussolini’s Gold, hoarded inside the fortified Black Zone of Naples.

Isola will need to expand his team. The aged sniper/bodyguard Macello (Tommaso Ragno) and comics nerd/decoder/tech whiz Amadeo (Luigi Fidele) will need to enlist a street-fighting pickpocket (Rebecca Coco) Amadeo is sweet on. If they can find the on the lam “hero of our nation” race car driver (Maccio Capatonda), they’ll be able to make their get away.

And they really could use the “best in the business” bomb maker, the anarchist with the cute “nom de guerre” Molotov (Alberto Astorri). He’s the one they have to rescue from the noose, spaghetti Western style.

That’s the first of the “heists” the precede the “big heist,” as this crew has to crash a posh cocktail party, steal this or that, figure out who they can trust and who will stab them in the back on their way to the gold stash, freedom and glory.

The acting’s indifferent, with only the odd line or situation giving anybody a chance to shine.

It’s all strictly formula, with a dash of wit here and a fun classic car chase there.

Not enough of it works to recommend, but it’s always fun to be reminded that campy action films are their own international language, and they travel better than any other film genre — from Italy to Thailand, Hong Kong to Korea and the Philippines, and eventually to a video store in Manhattan Beach, California, where a certain wired film nerd took it all in and made it his brand.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Pietro Castellitto, Matilda De Angelis, Isabella Ferrari, Tommaso Ragno, Rebecca Coco Edogamhe, Alberto Astorri, Maccio Capatonda, Luigi Fedele and Filippo Timi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Renato De Maria. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36

Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle and Adam Driver star in this adaptation of one of the most celebrated novels of the ’80, DeLillo’s post-modern look at life and family and happiness and mortality in uncertain, fraught times.

So perhaps waiting over 30 years to put it on the screen (Netflix money helps) was a smart idea.

It’s coming to theaters, then rolling onto Netflix.

“The Menu” is a darkly funny, culture-skewering satire that’s easier to defend on cinematic grounds than more — you know — logical ones.

It takes its design and tone from the austere aesthetics of chilly, modernist architecture, which mimics the “look of the land” one builds on in a structure of stone, burnished wood and polished steel, creating a restaurant with the feel of wealth and exclusivity, and all the warmth of an operating room.

That goes for the food in this “foodie thriller” as well — molecular gastronomy, with each gelled, flash-frozen, emulsified course a master class in chemistry, biology and history, pretentiously presented as an occasion in itself, paired with the perfect wine, fermented not just from grapes from “the same vineyard, but the same row of vines.”

And that’s but the backdrop, the milieu of “Succession/Game of Thrones” director Mark Mylod’s thriller, a morality tale with uncertain morality, a plot that doesn’t withstand much scrutiny and Anya Taylor-Joy as its sole “special effect.”

A collection of elite “types” gather on a dock, waiting for a motor yacht to take them to the The Hawthorne, most exclusive restaurant this corner of the world offers. They’re heading into a four and a half hour, multi-course prix fixe meal prepared by a huge staff from locally-sourced ingredients in a no expense spared eatery on an exclusive 12 acre island.

This “biome of culinary ideas” feeds twelve-and-only-twelve swells at each sitting, $1250 per person for the latest and the greatest from Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes), who rules his kitchen foot-soldiers, and presides over his guests, like a dictator.

He announces each course with a thunderous clap that echoes through the stone, mahogany and steel dining room like a gunshot. Because we can’t have music to dine by in such a shrine to ego and eating. Diners are urged not to “eat,” but to “taste, savor, relish” each immaculately presented dish.

Every “Soup Nazi” must have his majordomo/maitre’d, and the martinet Elsa (Hong Chau, brilliantly brittle) runs front of house like a military operation, her disciplined foot soldiers serving people from whom she expects the same discipline.

But “no photos” of the food, you poseurs, is sure to fall on deaf ears.

And who is this crowd? There’s the has-been actor (John Leguizamo) with dreams of a travel-cooking show comeback, and his turned-in-her-notice assistant (Aimee Carrero). A trio of rich tech bros (Rob Yang, Arturo Castro and Mark St. Cyr) and an obscenely well-heeled older couple (Judith Light, Reed Birney) join chef’s elderly mother (Rebecca Koon), whom we gather is a regular.

“At least we can say we’ve been here” is overheard, which is the byword of attention whores in any “attention economy” eatery.

A career-making food-critic (Janet McTeer) who “made” our chef is also here with her obsequious editor (Paul Adelstein).

And then there’s the foodie, the well-off and obnoxiously well-versed Tyler (Nicholas Hoult, archly annoying), here to explain why his date (Taylor-Joy) and us why we should relish this experience, revel in the glory of this “artist” and how she and we should celebrate every salmon-egg-sized morsel plated in front of us.

Taylor-Joy’s Margo? She is the audience’s surrogate, taking this all in, refusing to take it all that seriously and taking note of the all red flags about this evening she sees and hears from the all-knowing staff, which likes to “know who all of our guests are,” but which doesn’t know Margot. She was a last minute substitute date.

A bread course — with no bread, but a long written explanation of what they were not deemed worthy of eating — is the dead give-away. With no music to mask individual conversations, Margo and everyone else has to hear Elsa the maitre’d’s stage-whispered hiss to the tech bros.

“You will eat less than you desire and more than you deserve.“

It’s when things go “off menu” that “The Menu” is supposed to turn exciting, and instead becomes problematic. We’ve not wholly established what makes this or that character so repellent and such a walking, talking and greedy social ill that they “deserve” whatever is to come, before whatever is to come arrives.

The violence is shocking, but there’s a disconnect to it. “Our” grievance against “their” crimes and transgressions might be explained, but the explanations are lacking. The tailor-made comeuppances — a faithless spouse’s ring finger is lopped off — are too pat, too easy and in no real sense a punishment that fits the crime.

The diners’ rising paranoia is justified, their inertia in the face of a threat — save for the cryptic Margo — predestined. Like the “Blair Witch” Gen X cast, utterly out of their depth in the woods, these coddled one percenters can’t figure out that being told to “run and hide” on an island of a mere 12 acres is a non-starter. And that exercise, cliched as it is, seems to have no point.

But Fiennes has the acting baggage that excuses any need to over-explain his character’s motives. And Mylod lets his camera fix on Taylor-Joy’s perpetually wide-eyed reactions and under-reactions to the mayhem that breaks out, letting us see her (sort of) reason her way through this “last supper.”

“The Menu” is entertaining enough. But the meal is — like the horror movie logic of it all — perfunctory, if magnificently presented. We may not see ourselves in the victims or the victimizers here. But we can all recognize a “type” who gets his just deserts — over dessert — when we see him.

Rating: R for strong/disturbing violent content, language throughout and some sexual references.

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Judith Light, and John Leguizamo

Credits: Directed by Mark Mylod, scripted by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:46

The perfect movie to open right before Thanksgiving, a class conscious haute cuisine thriller.

We awaken from our triptophan stupors and get away from the turkey to soak up a little Joy — as in Florida born Brit Anya Taylor Joy.

Review to follow shortly.

If you’ve never seen a Filipino action pic, this could make a fun introduction.

Limited release Dec. 2. https://youtu.be/ro6xty9NWe0