Movie Nation

This looks cute, in a bending the Church rules, swiping from the Catholic Church sort of way.

Sept. 23?

Here’s a little Brit bauble that got by me, and you and most everybody else when it popped out briefly back in 2012.

“The Hot Potato” was “inspired by a” true story about a stolen lump of uranium and all the trouble a couple of mugs — and the thugs they consult — have unloading it in the late 1960s.

It’s got Ray Winstone and a stand-out turn by his daughter Lois, along with Colm Meaney as a fight-fixing mobster, Jack Huston (“Ben-Hur,”American Hustle”), David Harewood (“Blood Diamond”) the wonderful John Lynch (“The Secret Garden,” “Best,” “In the Name of the Father”) and veteran bit player Derren Nesbitt, who played many a Nazi in his day.

And while this caper comedy isn’t a laugh riot, it’s damned funny at times and generally wry and daft in tone, a Cockney-accented “Hot Rock,” for those who remember that ’72 burglary-goes-bad comedy with Redford, Segal, Liebman and Mostel.

Redoubtable Ray plays Kenny, who runs a low-rent metal casting/metalwork shop that’s slowing going to seed when a young mate (Huston) shows up with a fancy and locked chrome shipping case he’s nicked at a salvage job after a fire or gas explosion or something.

They get it open, and see all these lead pellets surrounding something even heavier than the lead — “sort of a baked potato with ears.” They try chiseling it and sawing it. Not gold. Harder. Finally they find somebody who can tell them what the metal is, at least.

It’s uranium.

A couple of running gags in the movie are the fact that Kenny and Danny have to be reminded how “dangerous” this stuff is. They never give voice to what this stuff is used for. Have you ever tried to sell something you don’t dare take out of a lead casing, something used to make nuclear bombs?

It takes over half the movie for somebody to figure out, “get a Geiger counter.” Maybe that’ll help with the sale.

Kenny calls the shadiest guy he knows, Harry (Meaney). And Harry warns him and warns him again and then sets him up with underworld kingpins, “The Twins,” both played by Lynch. They aren’t really The Krays, but that’s who they’re meant to be.

The twins, seriously dangerous men with serious connections, set up a meeting. And being hardballers, they start our story down a comically torturous path, as the price they try to wrangle keeps going up and this portly, shifty German, Fritz (Nesbitt) they’re working with keeps playing the angles.

Kenny, Danny and bookkeeper Carole (Lois Winstone), Danny’s girlfriend, find themselves galivanting from Brussels to Ostend to Luxembourg to Rome.

“The Vatican? Where the Pope lives?”

“That’s good. Someone with a bit of money, at least!”

The running gags are light and plentiful here. Nobody, not the alleged CIA buyer (Harewood), not the various Germans, the Italian or Israeli, ever shows up with a bag of cash and a willingness to close the deal.

The mobsters beat up Kenny and Danny, who burn through cash buying plane tickets or fixing Danny’s 1961 Jaguar — which keeps getting shot up as double-crosses and chases become part of the adventure of it all.

Writer-director Tim Lewiston, who usually works in sound design (he also directed last year’s “There’s Always Hope”) gives the most complete character arc, and many of the funniest lines, to Winstone’s daughter, and she delivers. Carole goes from lovesick office manager to pistol-packing mama like ones she’s seen “in the pictures.”

“She thinks she’s Emma-Bloody-PEEL!”

And Nesbitt, finding a giggle every time there’s food in sight as he’s playing a glutton who literally shoves everything into his face, camps it up just enough to delight.

“Eye zink ve are beink FOLLOWED,” he mutters, at the wheel of the Jag in the Belgian countryside. Not to worry, “I used to fly Messerschmidt 109s! Zis car iss a BALLERINA in mein heart!”

Winstone the elder is deadpan, a thick-accented Cockney showing us how out of his depth Kenny is by every thing he doesn’t know about uranium and geopolitics. That mysterious would-be buyer they just met?

“MOSSAD!”

“I fought ‘is name was ‘arry!”

The “Hot Rock” comparison should tell you this is a tad old fashioned, with “Man from U.N.C.L.E” and “James-bleedin’-BOND” jokes, dated chases and a lot of stumbling to and fro without anybody getting any closer to paying up and collecting the goods.

I’m guessing the choppiness of the narrative slowed this to a crawl in theaters, never letting the picture get up a full head of steam. But streaming lessens such flaws, and good players stand out no matter how the story is unfolding around them.

If you’re a Winstone and Meaney fan, it’s got just enough of what they do best to get by, even if Winstone’s daughter and a guy who supported himself for decades by clicking his heels and demanding “Vere are your papers?” upstage them.

Rating: TV-14, violence, some profanity

Cast: Ray Winstone, Jack Huston, David Harewood, Lois Winstone, Derren Nesbitt, John Lynch and Colm Meaney.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tim Lewiston. A FilmRise release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:38

Coming soon?

I used to be a projectionist back in in college. Carbon arc projectors in a 1300 seat student concert/convocation hall. Being a radio guy, I fretted over ways to improve the sound. But keeping those blinding white light carbon rods burning evenly between reels was a real art form.

Learned a lot about editing, pacing, story structure and the like by where story beats fell on the reel, just before changeovers often times.

This trailer has a lovely voice-over poem by Toby Jones here about the illusion of cinema, the spell cast by aiming light through celluloid.

Sam Mendes (“1917”) makes a movie about the magic of the movies.

Olivia Colman, Colin Firth, Michael Ward and Toby Jones star in this 1980s period piece, a December release from Searchlight pictures.

Awards. Bait. And “only in cinemas.”

We all know and have been saddened as we learned about Bruce Willis and the aphasia that has battered his ability to speak, remember lines or act. What hasn’t been explained is why his family keeps trotting him out there to make awful appearances in D-movie after D-movie, films that are beneath him and cannot possibly pay enough to be worth the cost in effort and to his good name.

Are their finances that dire? Is it therapeutic to put him in a familiar, supportive environment like a movie set making garbage like “Corrective Measures,” one film after another in a race against his diminishing capacities?

Anybody following his career knows he’s been in the doghouse, doing under-financed dogs save for the occasional supporting turn in an “Expendables” sequel, for over a dozen years. We can ponder how long ago the diagnosis was made and how much money he or those counseling him expected to put away making scores of instantly awful crap like “Measures.”

Because make no mistake, this movie is terrible right out of the gate, and execrable by the time Willis makes his belated bow — 23 minutes in.

It’s a stupidly-conceived, ineptly-scripted post-apocalyptic tale of super-powered super-criminals locked away in a Supermax prison presided over by hipster “overseer” Michael Rooker, running his fiefdom and appearing on TV to brag about how “Nuttin’s gettin’ outta here, NUTTIN1” while sporting a 1950s hep cat straw hat.

Willis plays Julius Loeb, “The Lobe,” and his superpower — powers are “nullified” inside the prison walls — is too laughable to give away.

There’s a gigantic religious fanatic psychopath named Payback (Dan Payne), a seemingly timid “empath” we’re supposed to root for (Brennan Mejia) and “The Conductor,” an “explainer” character who gives us loads of exposition as to the hows, whys and history of San Tiburon Prison and how the most dangerous of the dangerous are kept there. He’s played by Tom Cavanagh, whom I remember from “Scrubs.”

A supervillain prison movie with monsters, epic brawls and blood. Yay.

Here’s what it might be remembered for, the last time Bruce Willis tells a joke onscreen.

“You know how to make Holy Water? You boil the hell out of it!”

This is just sad. Hire the guy a new investment counselor, or let his family go out and get real jobs and support themselves and give Bruce a break. Even if this is therapeutic, it’s no way to be remembered.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Bruce Willis, Brennan Mejia, Hayley Sales, Dan Payne, Tom Cavanagh, Kat Ruston and Michael Rooker.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sean Patrick O’Reilly. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:46

Writer-director Neil LaBute makes a mockery of film noir in his new thriller “Out of the Blue.” It’s a lampoon of the classic femme fatale stories that define the genre — from “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” to this film’s closest antecedent, “Body Heat.”

The filmmaker who has dabbled in and sent-up misogyny (“In the Company of Men”) and racism (“Lakeview Terrace”) goes glib and tacky with a story of Rhode Island wrongdoing set in motion by an unhappily married, abused rich woman played by Diane Kruger.

The sex scenes have a wacky unreality about them — in a reading room at a library, on a rock in a park. There are dozens of pointless time inter-titles — “Three Days Later,” “The Next Wednesday” — waving a red flag over all of this.

“I’m not being serious, folks!”

And he cast Jack Nicholson’s kid as the “Postman” sap, the ex-con lured by a sexy older woman into a situation we see coming a mile off, which LaBute doesn’t even try to make realistic because the genre is, on its face, kind of laughable. To him, I guess.

Ray Nicholson is the fitness freak Connor, a librarian in Twin Oaks, Rhode Island. Kruger is the blonde he sees walking out of the sea after a morning swim. He is goofily enamored. She is guarded and coy.

“Fortune favors the bold,” she scolds him after a near flirtation.

When she drops by the library later, in sunglasses hiding a black eye, he is hooked.

But Connor isn’t just some naive, mild-mannered librarian. We figure that out when we meet his abrasive, bullying probation officer (Hank Azaria, terrific). The guy plainly isn’t interested in helping his parolee settle into a new life and forget the past. He wears a windbreaker with PROBATION in large, alarming letters emblazoned on the back. In public.

Do such jackets even exist?

The probie creates scenes and humiliates Connor because he can. And Connor, smitten by the lonely, battered and rich stepmother and her plight, pursued by the pretty and more age-appropriate librarian Kim (Gia Crovatin), replaces the secret his probie won’t let him keep with a bigger one. He begins a (somewhat) torrid affair.

LaBute is messing with us, first scene to last, with his obvious foreshadowing, the way Connor steers Kruger’s Marilyn to “The Postman Always Rings Twice” on the library’s shelves, his mention of the town’s name, “Twin Oaks, the name of the cafe” in the novel and movies made from it.

As to Marilyn’s “problem?”

“Maybe I can be the solution.”

The general idea here is a sound one, taking the conventions of a celebrated genre and sending them up. But LaBute’s incessant grasping for laughs out of “The Next Tuesday” and “Sometime After That” titles is instantly cloying.

Kruger plays Marilyn straight down the middle — a little Stanwyck in “Double Indemnity,” an attempt at Lange sensuality in the Nicholson/Jessica Lange version of “Postman,” a smidgen of Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat.” She’s adequate in the part, which is inadequate for the movie as Nicholson-the-Younger is out of his depth here, not really giving us much to hang onto.

Connor needs to be gullible but dangerous, his naivete and passion something we connect with, his secrets sinister. Nicholson gives us a couple of notes, not the full sonata. Without reading his bio beforehand, I didn’t make the resemblance connection and kept wondering “Who IS this guy and why’d LaBute entrust him with his movie?”

But the film’s bigger flaws are all on the director who cast him, a filmmaker who keeps trying to have his noir and mock it, too.

Rating:  R for sexual content, language and some violence.

Cast: Diane Kruger, Ray Nicholson, Gia Crovatin, Chase Sui Wonders and Hank Azaria.

Scripted and directed by Neil LaBute. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:44

An indie interfaith romance with no one I recognize in it. Sept. 16, kosher or not, here it comes.

Oct. 18, this documentary, narrated by PBS favorite Peter Coyote, streams and promises…a lot more UFO hearsay?

Lotta sizzle and “testimony” endorsements in this trailer.

Sept. 20, from Yellow Veil and 1091. Trailer doesn’t make the sale, but maybe.