Movie Nation

The screenwriter who gave us “Whiplash” makes her splashy (sorry) directing debut with “The Novice,” a movie about an insanely competitive college coed who takes up competitive rowing, where the competition takes over her.

Because if there are two things that Lauren Hadaway knows, it’s youthful obsession and anything that you practice until your hands bleed.

Her film defies easy categorization, a sports movie that immerses us in the sport without really being “about” the sport, with a freshman year same sex romance that isn’t romantic and a heroine who is anything but.

So no “‘Personal Best’ in Boats” headlines, here. This tense tale doesn’t invite us to root for Alex Dall (Isabelle Fuhrman, “Orphan,””The Last Thing Mary Saw,” TV’s “Masters of Sex”) or fear for her health and wellbeing. And that’s kind of the way she wants it.

We meet the twitchy nail-biter as she’s finishing up a test. “You finished first,” her teaching assistant (model turned actress Dilone) complains. “Why’d you take it twice?”

Alex sprints across campus to the “novice rowing” class at Wellington U. She just took a physics class test twice “because it’s my worst subject,” even though it’s her major. She knows nothing of boats, oars and rowing crew. Something else she’s not good at? Welcome to her new obsession.

After hearing how very hard it is for “novices” looking to learn and get some exercise “to move up to varsity,” the die is cast. Alex will be the first at practice and the last to leave. She will skip college breaks. She will row, either on the water or on the rowing machines, until her fingers and hands bleed, until she collapses, once even wetting her pants in front of her teammates from exhaustion.

Coach Pete (Jonathan Cherry) notices, and is disturbed. “Relax” and “have fun” and “shouldn’t you be stuffed in a library (during exam week) fall on deaf ears.

Because Alex has been told of the long odds. Because there’s been a little hazing from the varsity scholarship rowers. Because a high school jock (Amy Forsyth, a supporting player in “CODA”) is also a novice here, determined to make varsity and score a needed scholarship.

Writer-director Hadaway and her stars create marvelously contrasting characters, the confident, swaggering athlete and the chronic over-achiever determined to do what she always does — outhustle the competition.

Because Alex is all about competition. And as we learn in this quite-clever screenplay, “competition” is just the first sign that Alex’s obsessions go beyond scholarship, physics and applying physics to rowing. She and a fellow student, a friend since high school (Jeni Ross), show up at a fraternity mixer.

“I just wanted to get the drunk college one-night stand out of the way,” Alex confesses.

That teaching assistant Dani? She’s like another “experience” to check off a life list as Miss OCD tallies up all she’s up to her eyeballs in this freshman year.

Hadaway, who also edited “Novice,” serves up montages aplenty — Alex’s notetaking, coach-stalking and “out-working” everybody, this “seat race” (competing for a spot on a varsity boat) or that racing regatta.

Fuhrman’s polished intensity draws us in, even if we’re repelled a bit by this young woman who will not give herself “a break,” at anything.

And Hadaway, as she did with college jazz band drumming in “Whiplash,” immerses us in the jargon, banter and brittle women-being-women-among-other-women dynamic of this collegiate combat among coeds.

It’s enough to make you glad you took up sailing instead.

Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief disturbing material

Cast: Isabelle Fuhrman, Amy Forsythe, Dilone, Jonathan Cherry, Kate Drummand and Charlotte Ubben

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lauren Hadaway. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:37

This Jan 28 “high school reunion afterparty where the shallow, influencer host gets murdered” has no “true crime podcast hook, thank heavens. But Tiffany Haddish is the cop looking over a whole lot of suspects.

Zoe Chao, Sam Richardson, Ike Barinholtz, Ben Schwartz, Ilana Glazer and many others might have been the murderer of Xavier, aka Dave Franco.

Hard to tell if this will click. More characters means less character development.

This Michelle Yeoh star vehicle about an immigrant who is “the only hope” opens in March. Pretty dazzling trailer. Jamie Leigh Curtis and James Hong star in this A24 release.

I can’t recall ever dumping on a “Spider-Man” movie, and I see no reason to start now.

Yes, they’re as repetitive and formulaic as the other franchises in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But they never fail to find the cute or deliver a little warmth and laughs amidst all the increasingly impressive effects and fan service.

“Spider-Man: No Way Home” takes its inspiration from the blockbuster success of the animated “Into the Spider-Verse,” which toyed with the physics concept, sampled on “Star Trek” and embraced like the Holy Grail in comic books, that there are infinite universes, infinite versions of life on Earth and in the cosmos and infinite Spider-Men.

In modern memory, there have been three Peter Parkers, so the gimmick here is to create a worst-kept-“secret” situation that puts all three — Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and the fellow who succeeded them, Tom Holland — on the screen at the same time, joining forces to fight some fresh threat to the order of things.

And when you go down that multi-verse rabbit hole — or worm hole — you can toy with the possibilities of villains of the past. A little digital-de-aging, and Alfred Molina, Willem DaFoe, Thomas Haden Church and Jamie Foxx can collect a fresh check for bringing us “Spider-Man’s Greatest Hits.”

The fact that “No Way Home” hits during the holidays points to another inspiration. It’s like a “Doctor Who Christmas Special,” a reunion of many of the actors who’ve played a character over the decades — and it has indeed been nearly 20 years since Maguire and director Sam Raimi made Marvel the dominating Doc Ock of cinema and video culture, jamming its metal tentacles in everything.

These gimmicks don’t electro-shock the moribund storytelling, the not-quite-witty dialogue, don’t create chemistry between our romantic leads Holland and the latest MJ, Zendaya. But the effects are off-the-chart dazzling, and it nothing else, the picture jumps out of the gate and sprints until one and all get good and winded entirely too quickly.

Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) lashed out and “outed” Peter Parker as he met his doom in the last “Spider-Man,” “Far from Home.” Yes, even the title-writers are out of new ideas these days.

The opening of Holland’s third outing in the spider suit has him coping with the awful blowback over that confrontation, that “murder,” and that exposure as the formerly unknown masked do-gooder vigilante.

Oscar winner J.K. Simmons brings Limbaugh, Alex Jones and Hannity-style hype and fake vitriol to the devolving newspaper editor J.J. Jameson, now fulminating furiously about this “murderer” and “menace” on The Daily Bugle’s web channel show, The Daily Fix.

Peter is stalked, baited and mobbed.

With handheld cameras, extreme close-ups and next-gen web-slinging, skyline-hopping effects, director Jon Watts, who did all three films of this trilogy, puts this action IN YOUR FACE, and how. See this in IMAX and you’ll be utterly bowled-over by how far the CGI assistance puts Spidey and MJ on the Roosevelt Island tram towers, hunted by the paparazzi and TV news helicopters.

The new “exposure” and negative publicity makes Peter controversial and leaves him imprisoned in his own apartment. And it isn’t just Aunt May (Oscar-winner Marisa Tomei) and her just-ended love affair with Tony Starke’s man Happy (Jon Favreau) that suffers. MJ and Peter’s pal Ned (Jacob Batalon) all see consequences when it comes to where they can all go to college together. The trio is basically black-listed.

That makes Peter wonder if there’s a way to undo his “outing,” maybe make the world “forget” who he really is so that they can go back to the way things were and maybe get into a decent Boston school.

And that’s why he visits his friendly, neighborhood wizard, Doctor Stranger (Benedict Cumberbatch), looking for another Marvel “reset,” like the one that brought the world and the Avengers back to status quo ante.

That spell is where all the multiverses colliding comes from.

One sweet touch to the script is the way each “Spidey,” when they all come together, plays around with the “strengths” and peculiarities of their version of the character — Maguire’s wide-eyed earnestness, Garfield’s Peter’s lack of confidence, Holland’s much more manic take.

A few laughs are to be found in each’s ignorance of the other’s story and “universe.”

“I was in the Avengers!”

“Cool. Are they like a band or something?”

The villains remind us why Marvel is always best served when it cares enough to send for the very best. Dafoe’s scientist/Green Goblin Jekyll & Hyde thing is a winner, Molina’s Doc Ock in a fine lather, Thomas Haden Church’s working class Sandman eager to please and help out, until he senses he’s chosen the wrong side. And Oscar-winner Foxx’s Electro gives new meaning to the phrase “power mad.”

The multiverse rift means that even the dead villains are brought back for another round here. Apparently though, there is no spell for uncanceling James Franco and his Son of Green Goblin.

There are renewed efforts to get back to the Big Statement of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man pictures, the consequences of violence and revenge.

But the message to this movie, the line repeated by MJ time and again to tamp down her own expectations from life, is “If you expect disappointment, you can never be disappointed.”

That applies to colleges you want to get into, and Spider-Man movies. The breathless hype surrounding this one only applies to the augmented cast and some first-act chase sequences. It’s a perfectly ordinary arachnid installment starring your “friendly neighborhood” you-know-who, with a little wit (not a lot) and a nice dollop of pathos, good effects, limp dialogue and a great big gimmick.

It ends one trilogy with an almost-bang, and opens the door to more movies without the traditional Spider-Man reset and change of actors. Could Tom Holland become the Sony/Marvel James Bond, serving for a decade or more, barring a belated growth spurt?

That’s the ultimate “fan service.”

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbacth, Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, J. K. Simmons, Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina, Benedict Wong, Jon Favreau, Jamie Foxx and Marisa Tomei.

Credits: Directed by Jon Watts, scripted by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers. A Sony release.

Running time: 2:30

It’s animated and out in April.

How well do you figure the “National Treasure” movies played, how easily understandable were they to international audiences with even less knowledge of the arcana of American history than the average U.S. Joe?

That’s something I pondered while watching a Chinese mash-up of “National Treasure” and oh, “Antiques Roadshow,” with a smidgen of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“Schemes in Antiques” is a history-hunting adventure about a missing jade head from a Buddha statue, a work of legend long lost after it was lopped off, then rediscovered and then abruptly sold to the hated Japanese when a member of one of the “Plum Blossom Five,” the esteemed and ancient first families of Chinese antiques dealing, made a deal.

That family fell into shame, “pariahs” for that sale, and are “Plum Blossoms” in name only in the film’s present day, 1992.

But when the Japanese heir to the fellow who bought this Tang Dynasty temple’s jade Buddha head says she wants to return it to China, her ancestor’s will decreed that a member of the family of the “traitor” who sold it be the one to receive it, thus clearing a stain from two nations and two family’s names.

That “heir” proves to be hard to find, having changed his name and what not. But he’s found, and his quick take on the diplomatically-handed-over head isn’t positive. The head she wants to hand off is a fake. T

hat sends that hapless, hustling alcoholic heir Xu yuan (Lei Jiayin) on a mad pursuit of clues left behind by his late father, while pursued by assorted gangs and the more respectable heir Yao Buran (Alan Aruna) to the other family whose ancestor helped recover the head, but wasn’t in on the secret sale to a Japanese collector long ago.

That’s a complicated set-up, so it’s no wonder that tedious voice-over narration by hustler Xu yuan (Lei) has to load down the first seven minutes with literally nothing but exposition, and the first half hour plays as prologue as our two heirs are matched in a snappy ancient Chinese artifacts and antiques authenticate-off.

That’s how they’ll decide “who” the head is handed off to. How…original.

“Schemes in Antiques” is a film, based on a poplar Chinese novel, that bogs the viewer down in dozens of dynasties, vast numbers of vases and arcane bits of Chinese historical lore wherein lie the clues as to where the “real” head is hidden. This mountain of detail isn’t really what the movie is about, and may not be an issue if you’re Chinese and viewing this. But after a brisk beginning, where our drunken anti-hero spectacularly hustles his local “fake” antiquities market, the film staggers to a near crawl.

And the light tone promised by “Drunken (Antiques) Master” sobers up and dulls down.

Xu yuan can’t fight worth a damn, which would be handy as thugs beset him. The “chairman’s” granddaughter, Yanyan (Xin Zhilei), turns out to be the classic “SHE is the martial artist in this team” switch as she assigns herself to be his sidekick.

Except the fights are few and far between.

The story stumbles from one “suspect” or “underworld figure with the next clue” to another. One is an ex partner of Xu’s dad (Ge Yu), a con artist in his own right. Another is the elusive underworld figure Lao Zhaofeng, and then there’s Lord Zheng, a shot caller and dealer of long-standing ill repute, a “Lord” who turns out to be a woman (Mei Yong).

And every so often, a clue or antique is confronted, examined in detail by each expert, with their intense gaze bringing ceramic painted dragons and the like to life, at least in their minds, as they mention the details that separate “authentic” from “fake.”

Xu, once he sobers up, has the edge in this regard thanks to his apparently-perfect recall of conversations or encounters he remembers — even from the edge of consciousness — and his apparent eidetic memory.

Unfortunately, once Xu sobers up, the movie loses most of its pop, pizazz and light touch. Without more chases, more fights and more fumbling and stumbling across “the truth,” “Schemes” outsmarts itself and simply talks and “dynasties” itself to death.

I had higher expectations for this, seeing as how history and artifacts and clue-by-clue mysteries are hard to pass up. But “Schemes” schemes itself out of ever being interesting enough to hold my attention.

Lei Jiayin’s performance loses its appeal and edge as the character dries out and cleans up. There’s no “love interest,” just more and more characters added on and endless explorations of what might be inside this bronze mirror or that cave or contained within a clockwork puzzle game of “Go.”

The stakes in this can have a deadly edge. And the elements of a better “quest” movie are present.

But without the pace or giddiness of its Hollywood antecedents, I have to say this promising Chi-Kin Kwok (“Journey to the West,” ugh) project turns more “Roadshow” than “Raiders,” and that’s just a bore.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lei Jiayin, Xin Zhilei, Alan Aruna, Mei Yong, Qin Yan and Ge Yu

Credits: Directed by Chi-Kin Kwok, scripted by Hai Huang, Chi-Kin Kwok, Fan Wenwen and Kuan Zhu, based on a novel by Marberionius (Ma Boyong). A Well Go Entertainment release.

Running time: 2:03

This send up of Cage’s rep, image and last dozen years of career choices, not all of them “Pig,” could go either way…great or not so much.

What do you think, based on this first teaser?

Of all the “reconsiderations” that this fall’s glorious crop of big screen biographies has imposed long-held preconceptions, none more alters our view of its subjects than “Being the Ricardos,” Aaron Sorkin’s revival of the “I Love Lucy” of myth and upending of the picture many still carry of its combative, married stars.

It’s a brisk and snappy recreation of one hellish early 1950s week when scandal, “Unamerican” politics and sponsorship worries might have ended that insanely-popular program, just a couple of years into its culture-changing run.

Sorkin and Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman take us through Lucille Ball’s on-set perfectionism about blocking, logic and timing of the physical comedy that made her a legend, and her fears that her dashing, younger Cuban-American co-star and husband, Desi Arnaz (Oscar winner Javier Bardem) was cheating on her.

Sorkin and Bardem illuminate the open secret that Arnaz was the power behind the queen, a savvy businessman, his wife’s biggest booster and her fiercest defender, called on to help her fight off the revelation that she was once “a card-carrying communist.”

“Back then, it wasn’t considered any worse than being a Republican” she might complain. But back then, conservatives feared communists rather than cozying up to Russia, not that anybody misses Sorkin’s point or doubts that this very dry line could have crossed Ball’s lips.

And a stellar supporting cast headed by Oscar winner J.K. Simmons and Nina Arianda (TV’s “Goliath”) as the battling on-and-off-the-set actors playing the neighbors, Fred and Ethel Mertz, along with Tony Hale as the long-suffering writer/executive producer of the show and Alia Shawkat as the sassy/funny writer who still feared offending “the boss” (Lucy), get across the idea that a very small and elite corps was responsible for turning whatever CBS was putting on the air funny.

Linda Lavin plays Shawkat’s Madelyn Pugh (Davis) as that writer much older, remembering that show and “that week.” Sorkin’s framing device is the time-honored phony documentary, with survivors of the production of the series and CBS-TV back then played by Lavin, Ronny Cox and others, recount the series, the crises of Lucy’s communist ties and Desi’s skirt-chasing and their bosses, the stars, who were “either tearing each other’s heads off or tearing each other’s clothes off.”

Flashbacks show us both that one fraught week, from table reads through Friday night performance when “I Love Lucy” was filmed (not “taped” as one character says), straight through, in front of a studio audience. Other flashbacks show us how the brassy “Queen of the B” movies Ball met and bowled over the band leader Arnaz, and a string of pivotal moments in their lives and careers that made them TV superstars, just when it looked like Hollywood was done with them.

Sorkin’s famed, endlessly-quotable dialogue, delivered in talking-over-one-another crosstalk flurries, was meant for this material, the melodramatic behind-the-scenes lives of very funny, clever and biting show folk.

“Lucy” co-stars William Frawley and Vivian Vance (Simmons and Arianda) got all their mutual loathing — OK, most of it — out of their systems at table reads of the scripts.

“Is she talking to me?” “Are you DRUNK?” “It’s 10 o’clock in the MORNING…Of course I am!”

Ball, a funny woman boosted by her future husband’s pinpointing her great gift, as “kinetically gifted,” scares everybody, never more so than when she’s cracking a joke in the deadliest deadpan in show business.

“I’m hazing you, Don,” she tells a new director (Christopher Denham) at a rehearsal. “It’s just my way of saying…I have no confidence in you.”

But when the chips are down, the fractious TV “family” circles the wagons amid the panic and stares down the network (Clark Gregg, of course) and cigarette company sponsors over the REAL issue.

“You can’t have a PREGNANT woman on television!”

It takes longer to buy into Kidman’s Ball than it does Bardem’s Desi, despite the fact that like Ball she’s a great screen beauty and Bardem more ruggedly handsome than pop idol pretty, like Arnaz. Her performance — voice, posture, tamped-down temper and “gag” perfecting master craftswoman who “sees” the finished scenes and comic bits, and their fixable flaws, in black and white — is so brilliant that she makes Lucy stomping on grapes hilarious all over again.

Ball was funny “in her bones,” as they say. Every line barbed, every zinger perfectly-timed and absolutely intentional. Frawley takes an embattled Lucy out for a morning drink to buck her up at his favorite semi-seedy across-the-street bar.

“What’re you having?”

“I’ll take a tetanus shot!”

But Kidman’s turn is mostly a technician’s take on this supposedly singularly chilling star, infamous for her temper, ego and mistreatment of her inferiors.

Bardem’s Desi is lived-in, a performance. He sings, he dances and his Desi improvs his way out of accusations about his infidelity, “manages” his wife’s “commie” problem and drops hints about the reasons he and his politically-connected family had to leave Cuba decades before Castro’s revolution.

Sorkin keeps this compressed history on the move for the most part, although some of the idylls and reflections slow the picture’s sprint to a saunter.

The tsunami of smart banter is backed by a smoky drums and bass jazz score and filmed in the dim lighting of soundstages, the dramatic spotlit pools of darkness of Ciro’s nightclub, underlit homelife and office-scenes and ever-raining nighttime exteriors (in Southern California, no less).

Sorkin’s achievement rivals the reinvention of Richard Williams, father-promoter of the Williams sisters in “King Richard.” We knew Ball was smart-playing-dumb and demanding and awful to “the hired help,” with tales of her being banned from airlines (only some of them true) and the like. Sorkin and Kidman her Lucy “motivation,” and a softer, support-her-cast-and-crew side.

Anyone who’s read much about this couple, that show and their impact knows Arnaz and their shared Desilu Studios perfected the three-camera sitcom, that they produced some of the most popular shows of the era and as a final bow before selling out, got this little series called “Star Trek” on the air. Bardem and Sorkin give Desi a share of the spotlight, seriously human flaws and even a chivalrous side.

However much you know about these people and this subject, Sorkin shines a light in dark or unjustly-ignored corners of their epic story. And he makes obvious the strain and burden of “Being the Ricardos” into a film that’s witty and bittersweet, a biopic that like “Spencer” and “King Richard” forces us to take another look at public figures we think we know and consider them anew.

Rating: R for language

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Javier Barden, J.K. Simmons, Nina Arianda, Tony Hale, Linda Lavin and Alia Shawkat.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Aaron Sorkin. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: 2:12

A fatherless kid and future writer comes of age in the working class Long Island of the ’70s and ’80s, mentored by an autodidact uncle in “The Tender Bar,” a film based on a memoir by J.R. Moehringer.

It makes a fine vehicle for Ben Affleck, as the bartender-sage father figure, and for Tye Sheridan as the kid who gets into Yale and gets published. Both actors giving their warmest performances in years in a film by a director who’s lost his fastball, and can’t get his curve over the plate much either.

Whatever George Clooney saw in this tale of a kid “raised” by an uncle because his father is a drunken, self-absorbed lout of a disc jockey, he and Oscar-winning screenwriter William Monahan, — utterly lost without his screenwriting crutch, heated cell-phone arguments (“The Departed,””Body of Lies”) — are barely able to assemble this, with “memoir” their sole organizing principle.

Starting at point A (1973) and at point C (the early to mid 1980s), with both ends of a flashback working towards the middle, the film blows its “Eureka!” moment, loses track of its central relationship and fills the screen with life lessons and waypoints so banal as to make one grateful you’ve never heard of the book it’s based on.

“When you’re 11 years old,” our adult narrator (Ron Livingston) tells us in the weariest “Wonder Years/Goldbergs/Everybody Loves Chris/Arrested Development” fashion, “a guy could use an Uncle Charlie.”

In 1973, little J.R. (Daniel Ranieri) and his mom (Lily Rabe) are doing what “everybody” in their family does — “moving back home” to her parents’ house in Manhasset. She’s a single mother who’s just been evicted again, bitter about “going back” and refusing to call the place “home.” Her retired, whimsically disconnected Dad (Christopher Lloyd) takes it all in not-quite-insulting stride. His house is “overrun with aunts and cousins,” a riot of noise, relationships and crusty, bluff sentiment, all a reflection of grandpa.

But never-married Uncle Charlie (Affleck), spirits purveyor at the family bar — The Dickens — sees this as his moment to step up. Like everybody else in this family, he talks to the kid like an equally foul-mouthed adult. He sizes up J.R.’s lack of sports acumen, his need to find his “it,” whatever “it” is, and makes his promise to “never lie to you.”

He’s the one who warns J.R. about looking “for your father in the radio,” where the kid can hear “The Voice,” the New York D.J. who fathered him, is never there for him and can’t be bothered with child support. “Don’t look for your father to save you.”

As Charlie sends J.R. on “smokes” runs, sets him up with sodas at his book-covered, barfly-friendly Dickens watering hole, he sets out to teach the kid “The Male Sciences,” where to keep “your butts” (cigarettes), your “stash” (emergency money in your wallet), what to do with your liquor (“Hold it.”), to learn the essentials such as “how to change a tire and jump a car” and to “always take care of your mother.”

Before too long, J.R. settles into the books Uncle Charlie points him to “if you want to be a writer,” and the bar jargon, how to “back up” (order a drink for) his colorful, friendly fellow barflies (Max Casella, Michael Braun, et al).

Concurrently, the story jumps ahead to “I wanna be a writer” J.R. (Sheridan) as he’s heading to Yale, attending Yale, falling for the wrong woman at Yale (Briana Middleton) and in the film’s most eye-rolling touch, chatting up a friendly Irish priest (Billy Meleady) on his train rides to and from New Haven.

Every now and then, “The Voice” (Max Martini) comes back into J.R.’s life.

Clooney walks us through the waypoints and pivotal moments of J.R.’s early years with barely enough emphasis for us to have those “Wonder Years”/movie memoir cliche “That’s when I first realized” epiphanies.

Clooney half-heartedly makes points about how nothing changes in Manhasset. Fashions? A little. Relationships? Rarely. But for some reason, the cars and music never do. It’s all a hazy blur of condensed memory, being “stuck” in a rut somewhere, but still sloppy for a period piece.

We get little sense our hero is “special,” aside from an early push towards reading and a first-job-out-of-Yale with the New York Times. The “writing” and “talent” aren’t present, the distinct voice indistinct in the extreme.

But a sweet scene or light touch here and there brings us right back. Grandpa didn’t raise bookish kids by accident. Uncle Charlie has two very human Achilles heels and even the memoirist’s limitations are laid out as “I’m writing a novel” when everybody tells him publishing is “leaning towards memoirs.”

So? Write what you know, surf the wave.

Affleck finishes off a pretty good acting year that won’t earn him much credit (“The Last Duel” bombed, this isn’t a box office or awards contender). He makes Charlie colorful, dutiful and a fond remembrance of a guy who put a kid on the right path.

Young Ranieri is properly wide-eyed and angelic, and Sheridan gets to smile, something his career has rarely afforded him the chance to do.

And the setting is a Bar of the Sentimental Imagination, where even the alcoholics have a charming literary color about them.

As undemanding and shambolic as it is, “The Tender Bar” takes you in with warm afterglow and some winning, “I’d like to have a drink with that guy” moments. But even Amazon should see that after “The Midnight Sky,” “Catch-22,” “Suburbicon” and “The Monuments Men,” Clooney’s a Hollywood icon best parked in front of the camera, not behind it.

Rating: R for language throughout and some sexual content

Cast: Ben Affleck, Tye Sheridan, Lily Rabe, Daniel Ranieri, Briana Middleton, Max Martini, Rhenzy Feliz, Max Casella and Christopher Lloyd.

Credits: Directed by George Clooney, scripted by William Monahan, based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer. An Amazon Studios release.

Running time: :1:44

Icky in that “Human Centipede” way, as excruciating as any torture porn thriller, and damned ridiculous by the time all is said and done, the Spanish thriller “Dos” or “Two” sets up a simple, nasty problem and fails to engage us in helping the trapped couple solve it.

Two people wake up, naked and lying on top of one another in bed. He doesn’t know her. She doesn’t know him.

And the reason they can’t “disengage,” get up and sort this out is that they’re stitched together at the abdomen.

Sexy.

Furious minutes of mistrust open this relationship. Neither wants to be the first to give out a name.

“Who ARE you?” “Who the F— are YOU?” (in English, or in Spanish with optional subtitles).

Precious minutes slip by as her rage at “Why did you DO this to me?” is slow to abate.

“Tranquila,” sister. Think for a second. Who in the name of Santiago would do this to himself, just to hurt you?

They question each other, test out getting up and cope with immediate concerns — pain relief, thirst, hunger, bathroom breaks. And they try to figure out who did this, who is “watching” them (pain pills, etc., mysteriously appear whenever the lights go out).

Sara (Marina Gatell) wonders if her hateful husband is capable of this. David (Pablo Derqiui) is cagey about his work, his dating history and anybody he can think of with a motive to hurt him and this person he doesn’t recognize.

There’s volatile chemistry between the stars, but little urgency to what’s going on. The nature of the wound and how it connects them seems to shift to meet the needs of camera blocking. Yes, at some point, the fact that they’re nude and attractive 30somethings trumps the pain and terror of their situation. And every so often, the ugly wound is looked over, fresh injuries are suffered, fresh clues point them to some counter-measures to whoever did this awful thing to them.

Three people had a hand in the script to actress-turned-director Mar Targarona’s film, three writers who take on a “Saw” level puzzle and make solving it less important than each character’s seeming guilt over what they’re not revealing make us wonder “Did they bring this on themselves?”

It makes for a dull, illogical thriller that’s an excruciating 71 minutes, and not excruciating in a good way, either.

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

Cast: Marina Gatell, Pablo Derqui

Credits: Directed by Mar Targarona, scripted by Cuca Canals, Christian Molina and Mike Hostench. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:11