Movie Nation

The Babys and Bad English front man is captured as he gets back to it after the enforced pandemic layoff.

Unusual trailer for this Dec. 6 release. There’s pretty much no music in it to remind folks of who this still long-haired ’80s icon is.

This horror/sci-fi tale with dark comedy elements is from the folks who gave us “The Endless,” and it looks…OUT there.

Moorhead & Benson, they go by. And with “Something in the Dirt,” they’ve given us something else to look forward to. Nov. 4, streaming Nov. 22.

The murders in “Holy Spider,” a Danish thriller about an Iranian serial killer, are some of the most disturbing ever filmed. There’s nothing pretty about strangling someone to death, and no avoiding the pathos in the victim’s eyes as she struggles to free herself from a brute’s chokehold and she breathes her last.

We pity each one, hope for justice and fear for the intrepid reporter hunting this murderer by any means at her disposal. But as the killer is a devout Muslim and the victims are streetwalkers and junkies, there are no guarantees that any sort of “Hollywood ending” is coming. Not in Iran. Not any time soon.

Director and co-writer Ali Abbasi’s film is a “police procedural” as seen through the eyes of a reporter doing what the police won’t — tracking down the man motorbiking through the Mahshad night, picking up sex workers and strangling them, dumping their bodies on the outskirts of town.

Zar Amir-Ebrahimi (“Tehran Taboo”) is Arezoo Rahimi, a Tehran reporter come to this “holy city” not on pilgrimage, but to find out why the police are not having any luck at tracking down a killer who has claimed a dozen victims already. She is sophisticated and testy, quick to bite the head off an inquisitive “morality police” enabling hotel clerk who wants her to “Please cover your hair.”

To a one, the men this woman has to deal with in this patriarchal, theocratic “man’s world” are self-satisfied and assured of their permanent status in the hierarchy. But if they don’t give a damn that some creep is murdering hookers, maybe someone in Tehran will be, if she can just get to the bottom of this.

“DNA” testing is new and “Tehran doesn’t know what it’s doing” with it, as local reporter Sharifi (Arash Ashtiani) explains, making excuses. His own coverage has been sanitized, and she’s as shocked as we are that the killer has been calling Sharifi to vent and rant and tell him where the latest body is.

Because A) Sharifi recorded those calls, B) never told the cops and C) his reason was that the killer has declared a “fatwa” against the “corrupt women,” and nobody — not the police, not the mullahs or Imams — would want that Islamic “justification” reported.

So it’s no surprise that the cop (Sina Parvaneh) in charge is more interested in flirting with the reporter than getting a prostitute to act as “bait” for the killer. Even if they’ve seen 100 police procedurals on TV, that doesn’t mean Iran’s police would risk sharia law violations to solve the case.

Our heroine is deathly disturbed by all this, appalled by the nature of the crimes and cynical about whether justice will ever be done. Because when the cops are this slow-footed, it’s because they don’t care or maybe they figure the killer is doing the Islamic Republic a favor.

Denmark’s selection as its Best International Feature Oscar contender is in Persian with English subtitles, an Iranian story told with uncensored European brutality and sexual frankness. Abbasi shocks usstraight off with nudity and explicit sex, punctuated with the horrific murder of a sex worker who leaves her little girl behind for the night to go and earn enough to keep them alive.

Even if you’re a jaded movie-goer who figures she or he have seen it all when it comes to violence in the cinema, that first murderous assault is jarring as well as heartbreaking.

Abbasi (“Border”) tells his story from a multiple points of view. We sometimes follow the sex workers’ lives right up to the moment they meet murderous Saeed (Medhi Bajestani, hatefully brilliant) on his bike. Other times, we see his home life, work life, preparations and cover-up.

Mostly though, it is Rahimi’s point of view that we identify with. Professional woman or not, Arezoo has lived as a second class citizen her entire life. She knows the perils of the patriarchy, how little control or power she has in most interactions with men. She’s faced consequences for not knowing “your place.”

It’s impossible not to see this character and this riveting performance by Amir-Ebrahimi’s and not think of the brave women protesting their treatment and status right now on the streets of Iran’s cities. Arezoo, like hundreds of thousands of her sisters, persists.

But even as she persists, she dare not even hope that an arrest will lead to a conviction, that a conviction will lead to justice or that anything will change as yet another generation ages through a status quo that is repressive, dangerous and soul-crushing. In a state where religion is used to justify a Middle Eastern version of a phrase all-too-familiar to women in many parts of the Western world — a “war on women,” she is both combatant and designated victim, with no easy way to fight back.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Zar Amir-Ebrahimi, Arash Ashtiani, Sina Parvaneh and Mehdi Bajestani

Credits: Directed by Ali Abbasi, scripted by Ali Abbasi and Afshin Kamran Bahrami. A Utopia release.

Running time: 1:54

Oh my. Nov. 7 is when this bad garcon streams.

No one named Falwell or Trump, no evangelical “Christian Nationalist,” and no person associated with Liberty University or The Washington Examiner comes off well in “God Forbid,” the new documentary about “The Scandal that Brought Down a Dynasty.”

But Tom Arnold does.

The latest film from Billy Corben, who defined the history of Florida’s “Miami Vice” era drug smuggling heyday with “Cocaine Cowboys,” points his lens at the sex-with-the-“pool boy” scandal that ended the reign of Jerry Falwell Jr. as president of the university his father founded, and as American right wing “kingmaker” among ultra-conservative white Christians.

It’s a movie that leans heavily on a long interview with a Polo-shirted Giancarlo Granda, that pool boy who became a third in the Jerry Jr./Becki Falwell marriage, having sex with Falwell’s wife while the Christian activist and conservative demagogue watched. Granda and co-writer Mark Ebner have a book about the affair and scandal, “Off the Deep End,” in bookstores now.

But Corben, a documentarian with a solid reputation when it comes to facts and “proof,” also presents enough smoking guns to fill the most generous firing squad. There’s video and court filings and damning text messages and recorded phone conversations, presented with actors recreating the players in this menage a trois.

And Corben doesn’t stop with just the “sex scandal” part of this. “God Forbid” takes us back to the blackmail-worthy “quid pro quo” of Falwell’s endorsement of the profane, obscene and hilariously Godless Donald Trump. And then Corben has journalists, academics and historians tie Falwell’s father, the dynasty-founding racist and hompophobe turned anti-abortion opportunist Jerry Falwell, to Trumpism and the State of the Nation today.

America’s moral, racial and cultural divides that led to our current Constitutional crises are laid at the feet of the smirking Lynchburg, Va. preacher who built a TV empire, a university and a divisise, hate-filled movement that brought us here.

We’re led, date by date through the benchmarks of the infamous affair, which began when Jerry Jr.’s wife and the mother of his three children eyed and approached Granda at the pool of Miami’s Fontainebleu Hotel in March of 2012.

Within days a long-term arrangement had begun, with Granda “seduced” by Becki Falwell and then brought into their “world” by her “cuck” of a husband. The “kid” was just 20, insecure and naive enough to have never had a girlfriend, his older sister Lilia confirms. He confided in her about the Falwells’ indecent proposal, which she urged him to ignore. And like him she was shocked when they both figured out who the Falwells were.

From there, young Granda was brought into the Falwells’ real-estate business, meeting Donald Trump in New York, where the star of NBC’s “The Apprentice” met him and signed (with a Sharpie) Granda’s copy of “The Art of the Deal.”

Corben’s interview subjects include the co-author of “Deep End,” Ebner, a veteran celebrity journalist and exuberant vulgarian on camera, laying out the “element of kink” in the Falwells’ pursuit of “the Cuban stallion” with profane glee.

They were “the Southern Gatsbys,” Ebner enthuses. Powerful, connected, “wealthy and sloppy as f—!”

The film is peppered with evidence of this, years of Falwell Jr.’s inappropriate public remarks to and about students and sex mixed in with the parade of right wing extremists he brought to the campus stage for mandatory “indoctrination” speeches at Liberty. But it took the sex scandal for alumni of the school (represented here by Dustin Wahl) to seriously push-back on the U president’s power trip.

The mountains of evidence and the history lesson about the Falwell empire and its influence on American politics is the text here. The subtext is how all of this “greed” and manipulation and power-grabbing was done right in the open, with a gullible public buying in. Falwell Sr. cynically led evangelicals away from a Sunday School teacher Baptist president, Jimmy Carter, to the divorced Hollywood poseur Ronald Reagan, who’d signed the most liberal state abortion law in the country, pre-Roe, in California.

If irony “died” after 9/11, hypocrisy is this generation’s fresh cultural corpse.

As we see how the university’s draconian, fine-enforced moral code, “The Liberty Way,” was flouted, in the open and in secret, for years under Jr. rule, as we view how The FalKirk Center that Jr. set up, a “think tank” that helped fund and organize the Jan. 6 coup attempt with Donald Trump, one can’t help but wonder how a culture that refuses to see and shun hypocrisy can ever be pulled out of the fix we find ourselves in, with democracy itself literally on the ballot and no Republican ever held to account for threatening it.

Not to worry, Corben seems to tell us. Tom Arnold is on the case. Sure, “I feel like a bit of a scumbag,” the comic, TV star and ex of Rosanne Barr says, having seen the videos of Becki Falwell going cougar on the “pool boy.” But like Corben, Michael Cohen and a few others caught up in this vast right wing hypocrisy, Arnold kept the receipts.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Giancarlo Granda, Mark Ebner, Lilia Granda, Randall Balmer, Megan K. Stack, Dustin Wahl Aram Roston and Tom Arnold.

Credits: Directed by Billy Corben. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:49

There’s nothing worth getting worked up about over “A Chance Encounter,” so no sense wasting an “infuriatingly dull” or “tentatively tepid” over it.

It’s never more than a senseless waste of seldom-filmed Sicilian locations whose view is blocked by the two blandest leads this side of “milque” and “toast.”

The film is a rom-com star vehicle for folk singer Andrea von Kampen, aptly enough a discovery of NPR’s “Tiny Desk” concert series. Let’s just say she’s not ready for a bigger stage and move on.

Paul Petersen, who co wrote this, stars as Hal, an Iowa printing shop tourist who has made his way to Taormina, where Oscar Wilde once sheltered and scribbled. He’s brought a photograph of a pretty woman who once visited, and his notebook. He’s an aspiring poet.

He stumbles into this singer busking at one of the many scenic Sicilian overlooks, and after complimenting her “cover” of a tune he recognizes, he realizes that was no “cover.” It’s Josie Day — a traveling troubadour who has one album under her belt, and who has come to Sicily, with her always handy Martin guitar, for inspiration.

They connect as two creative folks looking for the muse to strike. She bucks up his nerve and ambition, he flatters her by being the only soul on the island — including other American tourists — who knows who she is.

As Josie has been here a while, she will show him the sights and badger him into reading her his poems.

“We’re both here to write, and I find you interesting,” she says, stating one obvious fact and a just as obvious lie.

I’d say they “click” but they don’t. There’s little chemistry and zero heat here, which lowers the stakes. It’s hard to root for a romance when there’s little sign the actors enacting it have any skin in the game, either.

The “relationship” is blown from the moment the “meet cute” fails to land.

The sense of place isn’t vivid enough to overcome the colorless young tourists standing in front of the scenery or leaping up from every unfinished Sicilian meal to do something else made more boring by the fact that they’re doing it.

The dull screenplay does the actors no favors, and the charisma-starved players respond in kind.

His “poetry” isn’t poetic and her tunes are instantly forgettable in that lilting, airy country folk navel gazing sort of way, though a Stephen Foster cover von Kampen sings is quite affecting.

Chalk this one up to experience, one and all. And don’t come back until you’ve got more to show us. This is, in most every way, a “Chance” blown.

Rating: unrated, as smidge of profanity, danged close to a “G.”

Cast: Andrea von Kampen, Paul Petersen

Credits: Directed by Alexander Jefferey, scripted by Alexander Jeffery and Paul Petersen. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:31

Quite a cast assembled for this Mark Pellington film based on a Dan Wakefield novel.

Future Oscar winners Ben Affleck and Rachel Weisz, and Jill Clayburgh, Lesley Anne Warren, Amy Locane, Rose McGowan and Jeremy Davies assembled for a a Beat era tale of two Korean War vets who come home to lives of existential angst and disconnection.

This is being labeled a “director’s re edit,” and a “Sundance hit,” which is kind of contradictory. Can’t recall the story on why this never got much of a release. Author or studio imposed limitations on how it was cut? Director acknowledging now that it just didn’t “play?”

Nov. 7, we find out what the fuss should have been about.

L

Anthony Hopkins, too.

Oscar bait from the team that showcased Hopkins in “The Father.”

So, these guys get their own universe, too?

“Beyond the Yellow Brick Road,” as Elton puts it?

Evangeline and Rudd, Michelle and a guy playing Kang the Conqueror.

Feb. 17.

It goes down easier if you remember you’re allowed to laugh.

Many of the best film noirs have their darkly humorous moments, and scenes and sequences so genre-iconic that a fan will give in to snickers of delight.

Director Park Chan-wook (“Stoker,” “Oldboy,””The Handmaiden”) goes full-on Korean noir with “Decision to Leave,” a delicious femme fatale thriller with mystery, tragedy and more than a few deadpan laughs.

Tang Wei (“Blackhat”) turns out to be a perfectly fatal femme in this whodunit/how-he-or-she-done-it, a beguiling suspect in a murder case being investigated by the intrepid but insomniac Det. Hae-jun, played by Park Hae-il of “The Host.”

Our lawman is a famously obsessive homicide detective in Busan, a man who lets his unsolved cases eat away at him so much he’s forever dozing off at the wheel and emptying bottles of eyedrops to stay awake on the job. Nights offer him no peace, as he has grisly murder-scene photos covering one wall of his city apartment.

He’s in a “weekend marriage” with Ahn Jeo-jong (Jung Yi-seo), who works at a nuclear power plant on the other coast of Korea, staying over with her in Ipo on Saturdays and Sundays. But as he notes, “People don’t stop murdering on weekends” (in Korean with English subtitles), so there’s no getting away from work.

At least this new case has “open and shut” written all over it. A rock climber fell from his favorite peak, videoing his trip as he did. Det. Hae-jun and his younger partner Soon-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo) go over the gruesome, fly-decorated corpse, track the dead man’s last actions and question his younger Chinese widow Seo-rae (Tang). Something about her underreaction to all this gets their attention.

“He perished as he wished,” she says, apologizing for her Korean. Sometimes she uses a phone app voice translator for help. But the language barrier isn’t all that makes them suspicious.

And when it turns out there’s other evidence, the cat and mouse game begins.

Seo-rae is weirdly casual around this detective, and as he stakes her out, gets her DNA and questions her about some intimate injuries, we see the sleepy copper’s problem.

He’s becoming obsessed, and this seemingly timid elder-care nurse from China can see it and seems into it.

Park and his sometime co-writer Seo-kyeong Jeong (“Thirst,””The Handmaiden”) fold in other cases that the police are working on, wanted murderers pursued with a breathless, bracing foot-chase (filmed with a shaky shoulder cam) or cornered on a rooftop stand off.

The jokes come from Hae-jun’s fellow detectives noting the extra attention he’s giving Seo-rae, the fact that he orders her “the priciest” sushi and kimchi take-out mid-interrogation and Hae-jun’s reactions to everything they notice. Are they worried about him?

“Killing is like smoking. Only the first time is hard.”

“Decision to Leave” has some fine second act surprises and third act twists. And some of the fun here is the difference between Korean and American tech and policing. The cops have an electrical winch-mountain climbing assist. Hae-jun leans heavily on his smart watch for surveillance, audio recording his stake-out notes. He packs a chainmail glove for use when a bad guy pulls a knife on him.

Like any American police officer would go to that trouble.

Start to finish, Hae-il gives us the feeling that Hae-jun is just lost in this lovely suspect’s eyes, under her spell. Tang in turn plays up innocence and a lack of guile to him — for a while — and letting the viewer in on Seo-rae’s curiosity about her tormentor and ability to size him up.

It is her cagey, tough and sexy turn that gives the title its double and triple meaning and the viewer every reason to engage with this latest winner from Park Chan-wook.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Park Hae-il, Tang Wei, Jung Yi-seo, Go Kyung-Pyo

Credits: Directed by Park Chan-wook, scripted by Park Chan-wook and Seo-kyeong Jeong. A MUBI release.

Running time: 2:18