Movie Nation

“The Great War of Archimedes” is World War II history with a twist — several twists.

It’s about mathematics, an “Imitation Game” and “Fat Man and Little Boy” tale of a lone genius whose calculations, estimating the “real” cost of the world’s biggest-ever battleship, could change the course of history.

“Archimedes” is also Japanese, and it’s speculative fiction, based on a manga (comic book) that ponders a fascinating “What if.” As in “What if Japan’s decision to build the super-battleship Yamato was a big reason the country was so eager to swagger into war” with countries (the U.S. and Britain) that were sure to out-produce, outnumber and overwhelm them in the end?

As our hero here, the “once in a century” mathematical mind named Tadashi Kai (Masaki Suda) puts it more than once in the film, “Numbers never lie.”

He’s a headstrong, on-the-spectrum and OCD genius who was kicked out of Tokyo University, but whose way with numbers, formulae and “measuring” and extrapolating make him THE guy Admiral Yamamoto (Hiroshi Tachi) calls on to debunk a bogus cost estimate for the ship pitched by its designer, Admiral Hirayama (Min Tanaka).

It’s 1933, and Japan, out of the League of Nations and increasingly a rogue state to the rest of the world thanks to its invasion of Manchuria and increasingly militaristic belligerence, must decide how to replace an obsolete battleship.

Yamato says (in Japanese, with English subtitles) “Forget battleships,” they’ll be “useless” in “the next war.” He and Admiral Nagano (Jun Kunimura) lobby hard for a new aircraft carrier.

But the Old Guard of the Imperial Navy, led by Admiral Shimada (Isao Hashizume) want to sink the taxpayers’ yen in this “beautiful” showpiece battleship — fast, heavily-armed and armored. Airplanes? Those two-winged (still) fragile little things? They couldn’t touch it.

When Kai gets the pep talk that alters his anti-patriotic mindset (he’s anxious to emigrate to America), how the hubris this ship gives the navy and the naive public could lead to war, he sets out to figure out the true cost of the ship, which any novice can tell would cost quite a bit more than its designer claims.

The quest becomes a thriller as navy factions smear Kai, his not-quite-girlfriend (Minami Hamabe) and stonewall the newly-appointed Lt. Commander and his aide (Tasuku Emoto) at every turn as they scramble to gather the data they need to make an informed estimate when everything about this unnamed “monster” of a warship is “classified top secret.”

There’s a deadline, of course, which gives “The Great War of Archimedes” (named for the great ancient Greek mathematician) a “ticking clock,” counting down the fate of our heroes and the world.

Writer-director Takashi Yamazaki (“The Fighter Pilot”) makes this mad dash for military math suspenseful and pretty entertaining. Kai’s fetishized measuring tape — When we meet him, he’s measuring a the faces “etc.” of a bevy of geishas. — comes in handy as he dashes from ships to shipyards, doors slamming in his face as he keeps jotting down numbers — length, beam (width), number of rivets per metric foot of steel.

Yamazaki also makes the debates in the naval committee tense and riveting. Lots and lots of that particularly Japanese brand of bellowing, harrumphing and taking umbrage.

The film opens with an impressive digital recreation of the April 1945 sortie that sank the Yamato, a beautifully-rendered battleship assaulted by a swarm of U.S. Navy Helldiver dive bombers and Avenger torpedo bombers. It’s brilliantly detailed — screaming gun crews blazing away and dying, the ship taking hit after hit after hit, finally rolling over and sinking as a sea of extras drown or burn to death.

If anything, the movie understates how difficult the “Yamato Class” battleships (there were two) were to sink.

There’s also a shakedown cruise scene set on an early Japanese carrier, launching biplanes and other scenes set on battleships not at war.

This isn’t a conventional war movie, more of a superficial gloss of “How we blundered into war” tale, complete with Japanese revisionist scrubbing of how their “advance into China” (a bloody, territory and resource-coveting invasion) history.

But it’s a very entertaining and offbeat spin on Japan’s pre-WWII history and the national mood at the time, and an intriguing if somewhat far-fetched “what if” about the country’s long, delusional journey into World War II.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Masaki Suda, Hiroshi Tachi, Minami Hamabe, Tasuku Emoto, Min Tanaka, Isao Hashizume

Credits: Scripted and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, based on the manga by Norifusa Mita. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 2:09

“Ahead of the Curve” tells us the story of Frances “Franco” Stevens and her founding of the glossy magazine “Curve,” which started life as “Denueve” in 1991.

A slick, sexy, hip and politically assertive magazine of the “Cosmo/Vanity Fair/GQ” school, “Denueve” stood out for having “A Lesbian Magazine” bannered across the cover top on each and every issue. As Jen Rainin’s film makes clear, it wasn’t cashing in on “Lesbian chic,” the movement that blew up in the culture and spawned TV’s “The L-Word.”

“Deneuve” invented Lesbian Chic.

The film follows Franco, who now uses a wheelchair and hasn’t owned the magazine — which changed its name to “Curve” in the late ’90s — for years, just as “Curve” is facing a future where she and others have to ask and answer the question, “Is a lesbian magazine still needed?”

Rainin and her interview-subject struggle in trying to encapsulate the cultural moment, where “lesbian” is hotly debated within “the community,” the subject of TED talks and endless reconfigurations of the semantics and language of gender — LGBTQ vs. TERFs (trans excluding radical feminists), “lesbian” as opposed to “queer.” It’s a turf war that may seem confusing from inside the community, but can be positively maddening to many outside it.

One thing the film does really well is track the creation myth of “Deneuve,” how Stevens, having left a marriage after discovering her sexuality, moved to The Mission and plunged into the life, realized there was a need for a magazine that was gay and not male-dominated like “The Advocate” or later, “Out.”

“If you want something, you need to be the one to take action.”

Stevens tells the story of signing up for a bunch of credit cards, taking cash advances from all of them and then literally “gambling” on herself, her Big Idea and her future by betting on horse races to raise the cash to get through the early issues.

A boost from people with the right mailing lists, and “Deneuve” blew up, a Lesbian-oriented magazine with activists, authors and “celesbians (lesbian celebrities like Melissa Etheridge and Lea DeLaria) on the cover. Yes, they had to mail it out in “Manilla envelopes” to their readers, to protect them. Because violence against homosexuals was quite prevalent in the culture of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” “Defense of Marriage Act” ’90s.

“Deneuve” “gave the community the gift of connection,” one interviewee asserts. And others, some moved to tears, recall the first issue that they saw “someone who looks like me” on the cover of a magazine which told them “I’m not alone.”

One thing the film does very poorly is take the wrong side, and give weight to the disingenuous claims of Stevens and others about the name “Deneuve,” letting them assert “homophobia” when the French screen star Catherine Deneuve, who played a few ground-breaking lesbian characters on the screen, sued them for using her name.

Like no one saw THAT coming.

But “Ahead of the Curve” does a decent job of summarizing a forty year blur in gay history and Stevens’ role in it as a spokeswoman for her sexuality and community on TV in the ’90s — “Power Dykes,” on the next “Geraldo!” — a pioneering publisher and a leader in the culture’s breathtaking shift in attitudes on sexuality, marriage and gender identity.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Franco Stevens, Lea DeLaria, Melissa Etheridge, Denice Frohman, Jewelle Gomez, Kate Kendall

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jen Rainin. A Wolfe release.

Running time: 1:38

Today’s “Around the world with Netflix” adventure is a half-amusing, somewhat brash and certainly chatty, loud and in-your-face Brazilian con-man comedy.

“Get the Grift” or “Os Salafrários” is sprinkled with lively moments that translate across cultures, characters and a plot familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a screen comedy and little bits of social commentary about “corrupt” Brazil and the ways the grifting can sway the gullible.

Subtle? Um, no. Not in the least.

The story is winded and a bit over-familiar, and the dialogue lacks much in the way of “zingers,” but perhaps the subtitling lets the film down in that regard. It’s in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles, for non native speakers. But “in-your-face” energy makes up for a lot in comedy, and our loud, mugging, stars (Marcus Majella, Samantha Schmütz) deliver that in buckets.

Clóvis (Majella) grew up with “a lot of families,” thanks to his wandering-eye Pop and the various women the kid got handed off to over the years. He’s grown up to be a hustler, a confidence man extraordinaire, with his biggest gift for grift coming from a paintbrush. He’s an art forger.

We meet the adult Clóvis as he’s passing off his latest “masterpiece” to a Senator, who refuses to let his aide haggle down the price with the plump, man-bunned talkaholic. The buyer wants what he wants, and maybe the money he’s playing with isn’t his, Clóvis figures.

Lohane (Schmütz) is the toothy, grinning step-sister whose only goal in life was to become a “micro-entrepreneur.” She grills burgers and chatters the ears off customers from her food-trailer, until the day she falls for the fake “inspectors” who threaten to close her down without bribes. She’s broke, and then her trailer is impounded by the “real” inspectors.

Clóvis, who lives by a sort of “never pay for anything you can con somebody out of” motto, is in a similar fix. You cross the wrong people, your apartment gets looted and the police are on your tail.

Did I mention him bragging that “I managed to sell Christ! ‘Christ the REDEEMER,'” the most famous statue in all of Brazil. Yeah, you’d have to be a special kind of stupid to fall for that.

Still, he “obtains” a car and Lohane begs a lift as they scamper off to a remote resort town to lay low.

Except that “laying low” isn’t in Clóvis’ playbook. He hustles up a hotel room, enlists Lohane in a check forging scheme, and so on and so forth.

“Why not just rob a bank?” she wants to know. He is offended.

“A scammer, a grifter. It’s different from being a ‘gangster.'” I mean, come on.

Clóvis is brilliant at enlisting passersby, strangers and other customers in his causes, downloading a blizzard of blather and BS that convinces bank customers in the lobby to chant and shout down suspicious clerks — “Cash that check! Cash that Check!“

He’s always got an eye for the next angle. He falls in mud and “s–t?” That’s how he’ll get a “refund” from the hotel that he conned into letting them check in without the “deposit” going through. He’ll roll around on the furniture in the lobby, wipe his body on the walls, etc. Blackmail at its simplest.

The picture that emerges of Brazil through all this is of a corrupt, lawless place where everybody hustles, every employee has seen such hustles and only a few have the wherewithal to resist. And even those can be bullied by a mob that takes the hustler’s side.

“It’s every man for himself,” Clóvis is always telling Lohane, who is a quick-enough study. Watch the way she contorts herself to get the perfect “selfie” in a dive-tour shop, a shot that includes the check the model/customer at the counter is writing at that very moment.

“Get the Grift” also has these little interludes, bits of Brazilian and con-artist history Clóvis narrates, like the guy who “sold the Eiffel Tower to a scrap dealer” story.

There’s a “Grease” sing-along, an auction to disrupt, and every time our hustlers get ahead, a calamity takes it all away from them so they have to start over, preying on the less hip as they do.

The physical shtick is limited (more Lohane’s thing) and the cons barely creative enough to hold our interest.

Still, I appreciate the stars’ antic energy even as they’re wearing out their welcome, and quickly.

MPA Rating: TV-14, profanity

Cast: Marcus Majella, Samantha Schmütz

Credits: Directed by Pedro Antônio Paes, script by Fil Braz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

The “Maleficent” inspired “Cruella” begins with a murder and settles, eventually, into a tale of revenge.

Starring two Oscar winners, each dazzlingly on her game and laboring to make a fun night out of this back-engineered take on how Cruella DeVil came to be a fashion statement and came to favor fashions made from Dalmatian hides, it’s a film that shows how great casting and design can only take you so far.

Despite the presence of Emma Stone in the title role and Empress Emma Thompson as her “Devil Wears Dalmatian” boss and mentor, few of its two hours and fourteen minutes of exquisite sets and costumes and perfectly-coiffed and modulated performances ever show the spark of life.

It’s too polished to be “a dog,” too charmless to produce laughs.

We have to wonder if “laughs” were ever the point of director Craig Gillespie (“I, Tonya”) and the screenwriters. In a sequel the world wasn’t begging for and of a character who was perfectly delicious without a “back story,” that “What is the point?” question lingers in the air when somebody other than a studio “suit” should have answered it on Day One.

Maybe asking who the audience was to be would have helped, too. It’s not-quite “Harley Quinn” or “Joker” nasty, not “Maleficent” bittersweet or funny.

Bathed in venomous voice-over by Stone’s anti-heroine, we’re told “I’m dead” before we see how the child then-named Estella became an orphan at a fashion gala hosted by the imperious designer, The Baroness (Thompson).

We’re treated to an Artful Dodger/”Oliver Twist” childhood in the Mod London of the ’60s, before con artist, mistress of disguise Estella and her two adoptive pals turned henchmen about-to-become “minions” (Joel Fry and from Paul Walter Hauser) set their sights on bigger prey.

Not at first, of course. Estella, hiding her shock of half-white hair under wigs and dyes, aspires to a career in design. And despite a very low-on-the-ladder start, it looks like she might get her way, studying at the feet of the mistress of “‘Normal’ is the cruelest insult of all.”

Estella becomes a confidante, the talent behind the “genuis” of House of Baroness.

But something will set Estella off, bring out her inner “Cruella” and make her the attention-stealing underground bete noir of the Baroness in 1970s London.

There are dogs — some real, some digital (Seriously, Disney?). There are other accomplices — John McCrea is the fabulous boutique owner who assists Estella/Cruella, Mark Strong is “the valet” long in the Baroness’s employ.

Hauser, from director Gillespie’s “I, Tonya,” slings a Cockney accent and is gifted with the one running “gag,” a con-man/hustler/pickpocket who’s always asking “What’s the angle?” even when Estella thinks she can leave that life behind thanks to the design fame and success, just around the corner. She’s grateful for the chance.

“Gratitude is for losers,” Boss Baroness warns.

If you’ve ever read a review here, you know I sprinkle pieces like this with funny lines from a funny film. There pretty much aren’t any in the Dana Fox/Tony McNamara script. Perhaps Disney could have let Oscar-winning screenwriter Thompson take a pass at this.

What is here is one stunning fashion moment after another, one vast Black and White Ball or gala opening for The Fall Line.

What’s also here is another “Forrest Gump” overkill soundtrack, an endless stream of pop song rights purchased and deployed to try and liven this moribund movie up. Blondie, The Clash, hell, here’s Tina Turner’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

That, alas, is what’s missing from “Cruella” — love. Not romance or anything of that sort, but poignant appeal for a girl who saw her mother murdered or actors in love with their roles and what they get to do with them.

There is never a moment I didn’t wholly buy into the Two Emmas and their delicious on-screen rivalry. But there isn’t a moment where you lean back, laugh and revel at what glorious fun this is, when it plainly could have been and should have been.

MPA Rating: PG-13, some violence and thematic elements.

Cast: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, John McCrea and Mark Strong.

Credits: Director by Craig Gillespie, script by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara, based on the Dodie Smith novel “101 Dalmatians.” A Walt Disney release.

Running time: 2:14

“The Soul” is a murder mystery wrapped in medical sci-fi, with a tragic, prosecutor-dying-of-cancer romance/pregnant cop-wife melodrama thrown in for good measure.

It offers up a lot to chew on, but a lot left undigested as well, all served up in a “thriller” that doesn’t really deliver and a mystery that isn’t exactly solved.

A Taiwanese industrialist is ritualistically murdered, with pentangle-like symbols scrawled on walls and doors in his mansion and a vajra club found in his MUCH younger second wife’s (Anke Sun) unconscious hand.

The scene is grisly enough to almost make the first police on the scene faint.

An investigating prosecutor (Chen Chang) gets more bad news from his oncologist, but decides — with his wife (Janine Chun-Ning Chang) pregnant and his next course of treatment promising to be a long shot, to go back to work.

But Liang doesn’t tell his wife, Ah-Bao, of his plans. That’s a problem, because she’s on the job a bit longer during her pregnancy. And she’s a detective who works with him, co-investigators digging into a very convoluted case, interrogating the same suspects.

Whatever is going on with Li-Yan, the widow of the dead man, the house’s extensive closed circuit TV cameras will reveal, right? Only they muddy the waters. Maybe she did it. Something supernatural might be involved.

Or perhaps the dead man’s estranged son and deranged heir (Hui-Min Lin) did it. His body covered in tattoos and his mind warped by the death of his mother, he’s into the same bizarre satanic religion she espoused. He’s got to be the likeliest suspect.

But the story was never going to be that neat and direct. The dead man’s medical company had financed RNA cancer-fighting research, which extended his life until he was clubbed to death. The doctor behind it is sketchy and secretive and played by an actor named “Christopher Lee,” for Pete’s Sake (Christopher Ming-Shun Lee).

This transfer of genetic material experiment, might it pass “souls” from person to person, in addition to removing cancer risks from their DNA/RNA?

There’s a lot of watching sometimes bizarre video recordings, interrogating this or that suspect or maid, and dealing with the manic, over-the-top acting kid, who seems to have motive in addition to an apparently murderous religious fanaticism.

Is the 20 year-old replacement wife in on all this, or merely a pawn?

Meanwhile, the cop/prosecutor couple is having weepy debates about what lies just ahead for them without a miracle, medical or otherwise.

Native Mandarin speakers may get more from this Around the World with Netflix mystery than I did. I found the acting either comically broad or frustratingly under-played.

There’s a little bit of metaphysical debate, about the “living” having to “carry on” with their grief and regrets, while “the dead just get to walk away.”

Perhaps the English subtitles are missing some nuance with that “walking dead” translation.

The forensics are feeble, the couple of blasts of action horrific enough, but the science fiction entirely too clinical and close to current science to generate much interest. And the whiff of supernaturalism is just that, only a whiff.

As ambitious, twisty and soulful as “The Soul” sets out to be, I found it left me cold. And as a whodunit, it’s a little confusing and a tad boring. Not exactly a recipe for a “riveting” 130 minutes of viewing.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Chen Chang, Janine Chun-Ning Chang, Anke Sun, Christopher Ming-Shun Lee and Hui-Min Lin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Wei-hao Cheng, based on a novel by  Jiang Bo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

“Port Authority,” a somewhat affecting New York transgender romance, is a little late to the “guy doesn’t realize the performer he’s attracted is transgender” party. “The Crying Game,” and “Victor/Victoria” are ancient history, after all.

But writer-director Danielle Lessovitz’s debut feature has New York grit and some new genre wrinkles that make it work. It’s “Midnight Cowboy” by way of “Paris is Burning,” and far more interesting than its ludicrous “How could you not know?” Achilles heel.

We meet Paul, played by Fionn Whitehead of “Voyagers” and “Dunkirk,” at the titular bus terminal in Manhattan, a hapless 20 year-old from Pittsburgh who gets his first taste of the city asking for help finding his “half-sister,” who was supposed to pick him up.

New Yorkers don’t want to know, don’t want to know you. They don’t even want to help when he’s mugged on the subway. At least Lee (McCaul Lombardi) is man enough to interrupt the beating.

He’s outgoing enough to offer advice — “The 2-Train isn’t any good for sleeping on. Try the A-Train next time.”

Before this bloodied first night in the city is done, Lee has gotten Paul into a shelter and hooked him up with “moving” work.

But Paul’s head has been turned by the street dancers putting on a show on Times Square. A lithe group of athletic, focused and seriously effeminate Black men, they have a “sister” that gets his attention. “Wye, like the letter,” she calls herself. And soon Paul doesn’t just have steady work, but a woman (Leyna Bloom) to shower his attention on.

Her brothers call him a “chaser,” but he’s tolerated, hanging around “House McQueen” rehearsals choreographed and coached by “Mother,” aka “Ma Queen,” (Christopher Quarrie). Wye?

“Single, but unavailable.” Her words say “Not interested,” but every toss of her braids and moment of shy, lingering eye contact suggest she’s getting into his “white boy realness.”

Pulling Paul is an altogether different direction is Lee, whose “job” is leading his fellow homeless toughs on eviction visits. They check out of the shelter, get in a moving truck and perform a “service” for New York’s slumlords. He yells “IMMIGRATION” and pounds on the door, they barge in and start moving delinquent tenants out.

Not exactly righteous work. But Paul’s head and heart aren’t in it. And he’s not picking up “I was in the Navy” and other clues from Wye, such as the company she keeps, the drag contest she and her brothers are rehearsing for.

Wye’s first big romantic gesture? Sharing a Nicoderm patch, to help the kid cut down on his smoking. Paul’s? He tells her “the truth.”

“If somebody doesn’t really tell you ‘good-bye,’ it’s kind of like you’re waiting for them to show up, even though you know they won’t.”

But Paul’s “truth” leaves an awful lot out.

The kid’s naivete is “Port Authority’s” toughest sell, first scene to last. He lurches into New York without even a phone number of this “sister” he hasn’t seen in ages, doesn’t know better than to sleep on the subway, and can’t figure out the “femme” he’s smitten by isn’t on the part of the sexuality spectrum he thinks she is.

Puh-LEEZE.

Far more interesting is the homoerotic nature of Paul’s connection with the seemingly-homophobic Lee, who drops the F-slur at every provocation and yet seems awfully attentive, handsy and fond of mixing it up with the boys — wrestling and what not.

The third act has a soap opera month’s supply of melodrama. But “Port Authority” overcomes this and its more eye-rolling “suspend disbeliefs” with engaging performances, lived-in characters and violent, run-down settings straight out of New York’s “verge of collapse” era.

It’s been a minute or decade or three since we’ve seen urban homelessness put on display with this level of detail in this blend of pathos and judgement.

MPA Rating: R for pervasive language, some offensive slurs, sexual content, nudity and violence

Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Leyna Bloom, McCaul Lombardi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Danielle Lessovitz. A Momentum/Mubi release.

Running time: 1:42

The delight of discovery and element of surprise were all used up on “A Quiet Place.” And that’s not just true for viewers. In the sequel’s prologue, the cast gives us the distinct impression that they can’t “unring” that bell, either.

As you’ve seen in every trailer, “A Quiet Place Part II” opens with a short, punchy “Day 1” prequel — the Day the Monsters Came and wrecked the world, Millbrook, New York and a tense little league game underway there.

From the instant, reflexive reactions of parents Evelyn and Lee Abbott (Emily Blunt and writer, director, husband John Krasinski), you’d swear it was Day 201, as they seem to “know” more than their characters should about the crab creatures who track them by sound and inefficiently slaughter the human race for reasons which are never crystal clear.

The cowering-in-place is true to life, but the muffled silence is not just shock. Everybody in the cast saw the first film, apparently.

But Krasinski still manages to back-engineer a tight, affecting sequel that is even quieter — brilliantly using the silence that deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) experiences this horror in — and even noisier.

Where the first film dropped us into the cleverly under-explained “world” this family was struggling to survive in, this one picks up the survivors — who barely have time to mourn the death of Dad, which ended the first film — on “Day 474” as they flee the farm they’ve been hiding out on, taking what Dad learned about the invaders and what Mom figured out about keeping her now-three (don’t forget the baby) kids alive with them.

Daughter Regan is her Dad’s child — intrepid, a tween who understands the DIY engineering that gave them the answer to fighting back, “feedback,” manufacturing “tinnitus.”

Mother Evelyn is still bandaged, battered and barefoot, as are they all.

And middle-child/oldest son Marcus (Noah Jupe) is still the accident-prone one, the one not-at-all cut out for surviving this, a simpering, whimpering child who seems doomed to a Darwinian reckoning.

Cillian Murphy is the neighbor, whom we meet at the Day 1 ball game, who has survived the death of his entire family, embittered and cowering in the abandoned steel mill where he used to work.

“There’s nothing left,” he whispers after watching-not-helping them escape a fresh, noisy calamity. And “the people that are left, what they’ve become, they’re not the kind of people worth saving.”

We wonder how much he’s talking about himself.

But a chance scan of the family radio reveals that a Bobby Darin fan is still out there, broadcasting “Beyond the Sea” over and over again. Regan has to know if there are others, if they can help and if they’ve found a way to get life back to “normal.”

Yes, there’s a pandemic subtext, right out in the open, in that land where FM radio lives on and they still play 45s over and over again.

Krasinski’s set-piece this time is a neatly intercut three places people in this story are in peril, each facing a nearly insoluble and potentially fatal dilemma. And he gives the picture a sweet coda that is as emotional as anything in the first movie.

That, and bringing on two fine actors — Murphy and Djimon Hounsou — to supplement an already stellar cast — make “Quiet Place II” worth watching.

It’s more slackly-paced than the original, lacks its surprises and the terrifying peaks that the first script hit. The “back-engineering” and “suspend disbelief” science and technology and character behavior shows, often to clumsy effect.

But the “Quiet” once again drowns out the “noise” in this, the best creature feature of our times.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for terror, violence and bloody/disturbing images. 

Cast: Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Cillian Murphy, Noah Jupe, John Krasinski and Djimon Hounsou.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Krasinski. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:37

Angelino grandson, a workaholic who toils in finance, is told “Let’s go for a drive” by his grandpa, who takes him out to the desert. He speaks of Old Mexico, or at least the Mexico he left to emigrate to the United States. The kid may speak Spanish and be close with his large extended family. But he doesn’t know his roots.

Grandpa mentions a couple of places in Mexico City that he remembers fondly, and gives the kid an order.

“Go back and take a look,” he says. And then, he dies.

That’s the launching point of “Tell me When (Dime Cuándo Tú),” a tepid romantic comedy built around a bucket list that Grandpa Pepe (screen veteran José Carlos Ruiz) kept in his diary. Grandson “Will,” who needs to go by Guillermo (Jesús Zavala) or “Guillermito” when he’s with family, will leave his seven day a week job and follow that list as he is forced to “experience” the things in life he’s missed.

“Get drunk on mezcal.” “Sing with mariarchis.” Visit the Fine Arts Palace, see the Main Square, the Blue House and the Satellite Towers.

You’ll stay with Danielle (Ximena Romo) his grandma and her friend Luci, Danielle’s granny, dell him. She’s show him around.

Guess what else is on Grandpa’s list?

There are little chuckles around the edges of this limp noodle of a comedy, and just a hint of romance to it. It should be bubbling over with both.

I only laughed at the crude and profane advice naive Will gets from older relatives back home and the daft attempts of Dani’s relatives in Mexico City — the gay restaurateur Beto (Gabriel Nuncio) included.

The leads are cute, but don’t have much chemistry, with Zavala especially coming off more dull and charmless than the role requires.

Ideas such as the bucket list, grandpa’s fondness for capturing memories on Polaroids and the like are introduced and forgotten as the no-heat-here romance takes center stage. A weaker plot point, Danielle getting her big “break” as understudy when the leading lady (real stage actors and directors plays themselves), is played-up, to little effect.

Veteran producer and first-time director Gerardo Gatica González even shortchanges what should be the movie’s no-brainer subtext, the sights of Mexico City.

Without that, “Tell ME When” doesn’t even work as travelogue.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Jesús Zavala, Ximena Romo, Gabriel Nuncio, Juca Viapri, Verónica Castro, José Carlos Ruiz

Credits: A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

Whatever else this fellow Will Smith — no, not THAT Will Smith — has going on in his life, he tells a helluva yarn.

And that “yarn,” about a mysterious neighbor he barely knows leaving a large and expensive stamp collection with him with an “If anything should happen to me” proviso, instantly drew in documentary filmmaker William Saunders & Co. It sent them on a four year odyssey, with Smith, to track down where these stamps came from, their value, and who this Russian accented fellow, Roman No-Last-Name might be and how he came to have them, and stash them with a near-stranger.

“The Penny Black” is an utterly-engrossing might-be-true-crime docu-mystery, a film laid out like a private eye thriller (they even hire an Archer Agency detective in LA, shades of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer), a story with big money, competing agendas, shady characters and a classic “unreliable narrator.

I mean we think, as the filmmakers do, that we can trust this Smith fellow. But can we? The fact that he has no visible means of support in a crazily expensive city, that his dad was a document forger/embezzler and that Will uh, goes through some cash, makes us wonder.

Everything about the film — from its shadowy recreations of what could be home movies of Will’s past to the score (dulcimer plunks that sound like we’re watching an espionage thriller) — screams “Trust NO ONE,” no matter how honest they seem.

The world’s first postage stamp, a British “penny black,” is among the collectibles in the big albums that this Roman fellow dropped in Smith’s lap. According to Smith, anyway. But that 1840 marvel isn’t close to being the most valuable stamp in the collection.

“The Penny Black” lets Smith tell the strange story of how he got the stamps, and then follows efforts he (and the filmmakers) undergo to ascertain their value at stamp shows and auctions, their provenance and just where this “Roman” fellow got off to.

Smith’s matter-of-fact disclosure of how he came into possession of them all gives him a “sketchy” vibe, one that he never quite shakes as months and years go by, he moves a couple of times, takes up with and breaks up with a girlfriend and reveals “gifts” he’s received to prop him up.

“I sold a few stamps,” he jokes, reading the film crew’s mind, and ours. “A gift,” he corrects.

As the years go on and they hire that “Archer Agency” PI and track a down folks who reported a big stamp heist years back, Smith and Saunders build the unseen “missing” Roman into a Harry Lime of “The Third Man” sort of figure — larger than life.

And Smith, who rather casually dismissed the shady seeming nature of their original exchange and shrugged off any idea he might have taken possession of something that could get him arrested or killed, finally seems to fret and worry over what he’s done and what they might uncover.

“I’d hate to put myself in mortal danger over some f—–g stamps!”

Has he?

Dive into “Penny Black,” before somebody options this for a feature film noir, and find out.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Credits: Directed by William J. Saunders. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:38

Sometimes, they lose you in the finale. They over-explain their “motiveless murder” thriller, and the explanations don’t add up to anything other than “pitiless psychopath” or the filmmakers do something else to show they don’t know when to call it a day.

“Stalker” is a half-decent iteration of the popular “identify theft” thriller, starting with “pranks” and transitioning to house breaking, thefts, and utter identity destruction, all of it with a side order of murderous stalker.

It flirts with “stylish,” and is just paranoid enough — if a little slow — as we watch our new-to-California teacher/tutor (Vincent Van Horn) meet somebody nice in a bar (Christine Ko), take a rideshare back to her place, and see his life steadily unravel as the Ryde dude (Michael Lee Joplin) befriends him, clings to him and then turns on him.

Director and co-writer Tyler Savage samples all manner of ID theft horrors and pitches his movie somewhere in the “Cape Fear” to “Cable Guy” as B-movie range, switching points of view from hapless Andy (Van Horn) to predatory Roger (Joplin) as he does.

Van Horn’s Andy experiences the downward spiral of a life he’s lost control of, a wrong he cannot rectify. The performance captures a little sense of the despair (crawling into a bottle), a hint of the rage. Portraying a teacher, it’s a toned-down turn that feels something like a cheat.

The inevitable “I didn’t mean to trigger you” and Why are you doing this?” get our victim nowhere. The cops seem amused at the destructive “pranks” the apparent master criminal is able to pull on Andy. And cell phone expert gives him the “see this all the time” shrug.

“You got sim-swapped.”

All of which is set up in a workaday Los Angeles firmly rooted in reality. How would you “punish” a freelance tutor? Send him to bogus “appointments” (a drug dealer’s house) for starters.

But the “reality” and the suspense and the narrowly-defined “entertainment value” dissipates in an ending that talks its way out of any sense the story might have made and any sense of satisfaction the viewer might have hoped for.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Vincent Van Horn, Christine Ko, Michael Lee Joplin

Credits: Directed by Tyler Savage, script by Dash Hawkins, Tyler Savage. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:26