Movie Nation

As “pick-ups” go, it’s odd and “classic New York” at the same time.

He’s spotted her entering a cafe. He follows her in and starts with a spiel — “first time in New York,” “left my bag on the train,” etc.

She’s skeptical, on her guard, and sarcastic.

“Where are you from, 1985?“

He calls her “beautiful,” backpedals into “not objectifying you.” Off-putting or charming? It’s hard to decide.

But something tells her to lead him where he needs to go. When that turns out to be upstairs, to her apartment in a hotel, we think we’ve got it.

Dominatrix? Sex worker? Role playing?

“What’s your name?” “I haven’t DECIDED yet.”

And snce the opening titles of “Avenue Zero” have faintly sinister incantations about saffron in them, we sense that something supernatural is coming. Vampires? Demons?

Rarely has a thriller started with more intriguing power dynamics — a shifting “Who’s playing whom?” puzzle — only to utterly abandon its mystique as it gives up its secrets.

An economical indie — basically a two-hander with a single set, and fantasy flashbacks that look more stage theatrical than soundstage-set — this Daniel Frei film, scripted by co-star Braeson Herold, is thin on explaining its characters, heavy on cryptic monologues and agrammatical declarations.

“Saffron cleanses the soul from impurities!” Oh? And it’s “of” not “from.”

The leads — Herold plays Joshua, Allison Siko is “Veronica,” the sex worker — click well enough. But her professional caution flies out the door the minute she stops counting red flags about this “John” whose response to “birthday” sex is bleeding out of his eyes. There’s no buying in to her suddenly discovering she “cares.”

The third act is nonsense contrived to deliver the Big Reveal, which is neither big nor revealing.

And all this talk about the magical/dangerous powers of saffron had me craving Paella Valenciana.

Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, blood

Cast: Braeson Herold, Allison Siko

Credits: Directed by Daniel Frei, scripted by Braeson Herold. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:18

Viola Davis was just eight years old when she saw the TV movie that changed her life.

The landmark film, “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” was broadcast for the first time in 1974. And even though “our television set” “did not work,” her family had another one that did, sitting on top of it. It was one of those somewhat rare nights when the Davis family’s electricity was on at 128 Washington St. in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

You want an object lesson in why “representation” matters in film, entertainment and other media?

“A woman who looked just like MaMama (how her siblings addressed their mother) came on television…and something magical happened.”

Davis relates that epiphany right in the middle of the horrific opening chapters of “Finding Me,” her new memoir about growing up painfully poor and not just Black, but “dark skinned” Black, not just abused but molested, neglected and ashamed of all of it, and herself.

Whatever glories were to follow, a child who — as she repeatedly reminds us — “didn’t have the words” for what she was facing or the willingness to share them all through a wrenchingly wretched childhood, had just gotten her first taste of who and what she wanted to be.

Tony, Oscar and Emmy trophies — “Doubt, “The Help,” “Fences,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and TV’s “How to Get Away with Murder” and “The First Lady” — widely recognized as one of the finest actresses of her generation, all spun out of a movie she saw on TV.

As she notes in her caption to a photo of her and “Pittman” star Cicely Tyson on the set of Davis’ own TV show, “How to Get Away with Murder” in “Finding Me,” “I secretly used every opportunity to hold and kiss her” every time they worked together.

“Finding Me” is a brutally frank memoir of the “Everyone’s the Hero of Their Own Story” school that Oprah Winfrey popularized. Davis describes the vicious beatings her racehorse-groom father gave to her mother, herself and her siblings, her traumatized and neglectful first-baby-at-15 mother and the PTSD of sexual abuse in a small town in an era when perverts were half-tolerated as town “characters,” who touched little girls, and worse.

“Acting up” and acting out at school, often unwashed because they hadn’t been able to pay their water bill, smelling of urine from years of bedwetting and having no access to soap, a shower or the ability to wash her clothes, it’s a miracle this child didn’t grow up and remain a headcase for the ages.

An Upward Bound acting workshop one summer in her early teens helped Davis “feel seen” and find her tribe, people who accepted her and shared their “everybody’s going through something” stories in this taxpayer-funded outreach program that so many credit with saving their futures.

Davis discovered she wasn’t “ugly” after growing up in a place where the N-word was hurled her family’s way on a daily basis. She started to shed her “shame” and come into the light.

But the “shame” and self-image issues she keeps coming back to in “Finding Me” still weigh on her and drive her art. She was years past college and Juilliard when I first interviewed Davis, just as her breakout movie — the film adaptation of “Doubt” — was rolling out. And what I remember about that chat was her obsession about was how “ugly” her signature crying scene was in that movie, “boogers and all,” as she jokingly put it.

Reading this memoir — which will make you wince or even grimace more than once — seems to explain that, the lifelong test that brought her to that moment, the shame that any less than flattering screen moment might instill, all those decades later.

It’s a terrific book whose brutal candor in description, interior terrors and unfiltered language puts a great artist in therapy, confessing her truth to the reader. And if you’re a little rattled by its first two words — profanities that she’d mastered at eight years old — that’s kind of the idea.

“Finding Me,” by Viola Davis. HarperOne Books, 291 pages, $28.99.

The most remarkable thing about “Private Desert,” about a cop discovering that the Internet crush he’s traveled 1400 kilometers to meet is transgender, is that cast and crew were able to get it made in the increasingly reactionary Brazil of today.

Director and co-writer Aly Muritiba’s melodrama is slow — 29 minute-long PROLOGUE slow — formulaic, dated and obvious considering “The Crying Game” opened 30 years ago north of the equator. But tender performances might reward those patient enough to sit through its scenic, formulaic and dramatically-limited longueurs.

Daniel (Antonio Saboia) is a cop under suspension when we meet him. Muscular and bored, he’s stuck taking care of his mute and aged father, whom he calls “Sergeant” because he was in the force before him. Daniel’s trying to show remorse, trying to keep his sanity and desperate to hear from Sara, a lover he’s apparently met online.

If she’s not picking up the phone, what hope do his texts and then sexts have?

When the reasons for his suspension close in around him, he imposes on his kid sister (Cynthia Senek) to care for their father and hits the road, motoring from Curitaba in the south the coast to Sobradinho in the north. That’s where Sara lives.

Muritiba’s script is intent on keeping two secrets, at least one of which anybody with a pulse will figure out. The first time distressed, lovelorn cop Daniel reaches Sara’s voice mail, most viewers will hear her voice and wonder, “Has he sized up Sara’s Adam’s Apple?”

The other “secret” is why Daniel has been suspended from the force, the nature of the crime that is receiving media coverage and the blunt threat of a “trial,” or so his superiors tell him. Has Sara heard of this suspension? Is that why she’s so hard to find?

As Daniel shows her photograph around town and even puts up fliers seeking her, we’re reminded that cops make the best stalkers. And then we start to see things from Sara’s point of view.

Sara (Pedro Fasanaro) lives with a disapproving grandma (Zezita Matos) and under the cagey protection of hairdresser BFF Fernando (Thomas Aquino). By day Sara is Robson, a very young man with bad skin and a job at a produce distribution warehouse. By night, the wig, heavy makeup, dress and Sara come out and she hits the club.

What’s going to happen when cross-country Romeo cop, on the run from his ugly problems, finds out? Will he even have the chance, if Sara’s grandma finds out first and consults her homophobic fundamentalist pastor?

The story Muritiba tells is naturally fresher and more of a novelty in Brazil. One can feel the film’s unstated political subtext, something verified by the fact that Brazil’s film industry selected this scenic and slight drama for Best International Feature consideration last Oscar season.

The thin story is adorned with that long prologue, which fleshes out Daniel’s situation and lets us guess-between-the-lines the nature of his offense, and then puts him on a striking cross-Brazil road trip.

Sara’s double life is far more interesting and produces the movie’s most poignant moment. It stands out because for a movie that promises passion and tension, there’s precious little of that, and the performances — plaintive though they are — don’t turn up the heat.

North American and European viewers can be forgiven for seeing this drawn-out if sometimes sexy melodrama as a tad quaint, right down to the tune that might become “their song” if these two can ever get it together, in or out of “the club.”

When a gay-friendly bar is playing Bonnie Tyler’s performance of Jim Steinman’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” it’s hard not to notice that most everything we see unfold was high stakes and “new” and just-then-losing-its-taboo here when back when that song first came out — in 1983.

Rating: unrated, sex, nudity

Cast: Antonio Saboia, Pedro Fasanaro, Cynthia Senek, Zezita Matos and Thomas Aquino.

Credits: Directed by Aly Muritiba, scripted by Henrique Dos Santos and Aly Muritiba. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 2:02

A crime still in the news thanks to the malicious backwardness of one state.

Coming to theaters in October.

The ancient town of Nasielsk still sits just over 30 miles north of Warsaw, Poland, its population roughly the same that it’s been for over a hundred years — just over 7400.

But a huge number of its citizens were hauled away in just two days of December of 1939, when Germans and German sympathizers rounded up the thousands of Jews there and shipped them off, the vast majority of them transported to their doom.

In 2009, Glenn Kurtz stumbled across a cracked, shrunken and decaying roll of film that his grandfather David shot there and left behind in his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. In the summer of 1938, he’d just bought the Kodak movie camera, and David and his wife Lena, who’d emigrated to the United States from Poland and prospered in Brooklyn, returned to Europe for a “Grand Tour” — Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, Warsaw — and the towns Lena and David grew up in.

Just 13 months later, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded and dissected Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. Warsaw and everywhere else Lena and David visited in Poland was forever changed, or in some cases, obliterated.

When grandson Glenn Kurtz started digging into the anonymous, unidentified vacation film, he eventually figured out where this three and a half minutes of footage was shot — his grandfather’s hometown, Nasielsk. Donating the film to the United States Holocaust Museum, where it was restored and posted online, Kurtz investigated and put out feelers, and slowly started piecing together some of what we see in those three and a half minutes or so — the trees, the Synagogue, a market, the Mezuzah boxes hanging next to each door in of the buildings in the square. After four years of digging and a few lucky tips, he wrote an acclaimed book about the lost world these grainy, faded images from the past preserved.

Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter uses that footage — and pretty much just that footage — for her fascinating forensic documentary about Kurtz’s research, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.” Stigter parses the film as it unspools over and over again, a collection of often poorly-framed shots of streets, with lots of locals — many of them kids — smiling and crowding themselves into the frame. She pauses for freeze-frames and zooms in as Kurtz, never seen on camera, relates what he, the Holocaust Museum’s Steven Spielberg-backed preservationists and effects restoration specialists did to try and figure out what this store was, how that face could be rendered sharper.

A historian, a couple of survivors and children or grandchildren of survivors speak as the footage became known enough for word to get around and for faces to be identified. We hear about the button factory and the hierarchy of Jewish society there, symbolized by the sorts of caps boys from different classes wore.

And actress Helena Bonham Carter, in voice-over narration and performing the translated questions of the filmmaker, ponders the mystery, breaks down the chemistry of celluloid from that era and notes that reds still show up in the faded footage because “the color red fades the slowest.”

She muses about how unmoored we are when we can’t place where some piece of film is from, the context we reach for and the “absence” that footage like this preserves, doomed people with no idea of their fate, smiling in a place about to be forever changed, scarred by war and genocide.

Many faces remain unidentified, their families wiped-out, and the few survivors left are unable to recognize everyone. Apparently no attempt was made to find non-Jewish elders of the town to see if others could be identified. But as historical accounts of the mass deportation recited here make clear, Polish prejudice was at its ugliest during that December, 1939 roundup. And the town was further depopulated when a thousand non-Jewish Poles were deported a year later as Nasielsk became home to a German forced labor work camp.

There are also no clips of the town as it looks today, just images of a model of the square where these three minutes were filmed used to show “this is what it looked like.” That omission leaves the viewer as lost as Kurtz was when he first looked at what his grandfather had filmed and not labeled. We must wait for explanations, and watch and re-watch the footage for clues and context.

Like the even more impersonal documentary “From Where They Stood,” which investigates and recreates Holocaust photographs of sites now crumbled or overgrown, the impression “Three Minutes” leaves is that it’s more probing than moving, more of a mystery to be unraveled than an emotional journey into who and what were lost. It’s still quite worthwhile as history and as a meditation on tragedy and the nature of filmed memory.

Stigter has taken Kurtz’s research and his grandfather’s restored footage and turned those “Three Minutes” into something of a flickering filmed “In Memoriam,” letting us hear a bit about the Kurtzes, moments from history and anecdotes from life in Nasielsk and the people whose existence has been wiped from memory, save for this snippet of a family’s vacation film taken just before disaster struck.

Rating: PG (Holocaust anecdotes)

Cast: Glenn Kurtz, Maurice Chandler, and Helena Bonham Carter

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bianca Stigter, inspired by the book “Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film.” A Neon release.

Running time: 1:12

“Spin Me Round” is a screwy, slow-building cringe-comedy about a simple chain restaurant manager who gets more than she bargained for in a corporate training retreat in sunny Italy. It takes a while to get anywhere, but as we’re in the capable hands of “GLOW” star Alison Brie, we know the Duplass Brothers produced it, and that Aubrey Plaza and Fred Armisen are on the way, we stick around in the hope a big comic payoff is coming.

Brie and her “Little Hours” writer-director Jeff Baena cook up an occasionally amusing tale of innocents abroad — managers from an Italian-American restaurant chain who get more than they bargained for when they’re shipped to Italy for a “training” retreat with the handsome and mysterious founder and CEO.

Brie stars as Amber, an assistant manager at a Bakersfield Tuscan Grove eatery. As the opening credits show us, this isn’t “fine dining” or “authentic” Northern, Southern or Central Italian cuisine. It’s factory made pastas and sauces in plastic pouches that the staff just microwaves and serves.

Her nine years of service are rewarded when the boss (Lil Rel Howery) puts her up for the Tuscan Grove Institute, an Italian working vacation in Pisa and environs. Her BFF is sure she’s “gonna f—–g fall in love” over there, and lovelorn Amber has her hopes.

Nothing like getting off the plane and into the corporate van, driven by dorky but controlling Craig (Ben Sinclair), sitting with bubbly Jen (Ayden Mayeri) and lost-my-luggage depressed Deb (Molly Shannon) to give her the hints that this isn’t going to be as much fun as she’d hoped.

They think “The Institute” is what they’re driving up to, but no, that’s the boss’s villa. They’re parked in a nondescript hotel, and stuck in a training kitchen with fake-enthusiastic chef Liz (Lauren Weedman). The rest of the managers are a nebbish (Zach Woods), a blowhard “foodie” who lost on a TV cooking show (Tim Heidecker) and a flirty ditz (Debby Ryan).

But hey, at least that romance novel cover handsome CEO Nick (Alessandro Nivola) is here. And damned if he doesn’t start paying extra attention to Amber, using his assistant (Plaza) as go-between.

Nivola amusingly sets off alarm bells as Nick, with his too-much eye-contact, textbook manipulations. Amber is on her heels from that first “This must be so exciting for you” to the “You seem so open-minded” flirtation. Will she even notice the gas-lighting?

And when Nick isn’t giving her the full-court press, his assistant is luring Amber out for “cigarette breaks,” onto a motor scooter, into clubs and impromptu illicit meals in the alley behind a 4-star restaurant.

We’re allowed to wonder what Amber is in for, and maybe just what the hell is going on here?

The title, of course, is a sexual double entendre. The jokes and gags range from thin to transparently thin, as the “foodie/chef” angles for control of the cooking demonstrations, the leech (Shannon) attaches herself to everything Amber does, and then one woman after another calls in “sick” for training and disappears, presumably on Nick’s motor yacht.

Baena and Brie wring a little bit of humor out of what the “training” devolves into and deathly-unfunny bits like Amber stalking Nick and his latest protege, only to have to try and clumsily turn around the Institute’s van in the parking lot while he’s watching her.

We get the barest glimpses of Pisa, Rigoli, La Spezia and environs, and see little in the way of food, for those expecting A Taste of Italy,

Things don’t pick up until Plaza shows up, and her big scenes come and go too quickly. The film’s third-act turn towards the dark, when everything the trapped (surrendered passports) managers have been warned about this corner of Tuscany comes true. And that’s where most of the laughs are.

Nivola isn’t a natural at comedy, but he’s good at giving Nick a sinister vibe. Brie is sort of a reactor to the weirdness roiling around her, and Plaza, Dyan (TV’s “Insatiable”) and “Portlandian” Armisen are criminally underused.

That said, if you’re patient enough to stick around for the wilder third act, “Spin Me Round” kind of turns things around. Not quite enough, but close.

Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alison Brie, Alessandro Nivola, Molly Shannon, Debby Ryan, Zach Woods, Ayden Mayeri, Tim Heidecker, Ben Sinclair, Lauren Weedman, Lil Rel Howery and Aubrey Plaza

Credits: Directed by Jeff Baena, scripted by Jeff Baena and Alison Brie. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:44

A lack of wide-appeal new contenders means that “Bullet Train” should run away with the top spot at the box office on its second weekend of release.

Based on Friday’s numbers, it should manage $12-13 this weekend, clear the $50 million mark and by next weekend we’ll know if Brad Pitt’s got a chance at having a $100 million hit on his hands. Not bad for a pandemic movie filmed inside “tubes” on a soundstage.

“Top Gun: Maverick” jumped back on IMAX screens and back into the top five, $6.5 million.

A24’s hopes that “Bodies Bodies Bodies” would give them a youth-oriented “Knives Out/Death on the Nile” sized hit are taking it right on the chin. Good reviews aren’t getting the kids to show up as it goes into wider release. A $3 million weekend, based on a $1.3 million Friday, says deadline.com.

Perhaps Pete Davidson isn’t a movie star. Perhaps he ditched the attention-magnet Kardashian connection a tad early. He’s not bad in the movie, and gets killed off early, “giving the audience what they want,” I joked in my review. Kids these days, who knows what they’ll show up for?

(Rachel Sennott of “Shiva Baby” and Lee Pace compete to see who STEALs this picture).

“Fall” is, it turns out, the only Lionsgate wide theatrical release of the summer. It’s pretty good, didn’t cost a lot, with supporting player Jeffrey Dean Morgan the only “name” in the cast. Unless the younger audience finds it Sat. and Sunday, it’s headed for a $2 million/tops opening weekend.

The Indian “Forrest Gump” titled “Laal Singh” is on over 500 screens, and Exhibitor Relations says it’ll hit $1.5 million.

“Mack & Rita” is a Diane Keaton/Elizabeth Lail body switch comedy. If the younger crowd is going “Who?” about DK, imagine the puzzlement of the rest of the world trying to figure out who Lail is. Hollywood ought to be cooking up Taylour Paige vehicles. She should be the star and not BFF in this one. Terrible reviews (mine was more indifferent) aren’t going to give this one the chance to clear $850K.

Here’s a book that stopped me short when I saw it on the shelves.

“Michael Cimino? Who even gives him a passing thought any more?”

He’s remembered for making a Vietnam epic and then the quintessential, megalomaniacal Hollywood bomb, for which he was all but consigned to the cinema scrapheap for the rest of his life.

With the passage of time, “The Deer Hunter” has fallen, and not just in my estimation, down the list of “great” Vietnam movies. And “Heaven’s Gate” was probably never as bad as the blast of early reviews branded it — just overlong. The recut of it, which I reviewed as a baby critic, made sense, made great use of the stunningly-detailed sets, costumes and Western vistas, and played. It’s still frustrating, still gorgeous and in no way deserves a place on the pantheon of the Best Westerns Ever. It wasn’t even the best of its era. Walter Hill’s “The Long Riders” was just as epic, just as period-perfect, almost as gorgeous, riveting and it practically zips by.

Charles Elton, A Brit who used to run a talent agency representing screenwriters and directors, booked some travel time to visit locations and the landmarks of the late writer-director’s life. He tracked down a lot of people who worked for Cimino, some of whom have never been interviewed before, and tries to find a fresh take on a filmmaker who went from directing Kodak TV commercials to Eastwood’s “Thunderbolt & Lightfoot” to “The Deer Hunter” to “Heaven’s Gate.”

Contrary to memory, Cimino wasn’t permanently exiled after his debacle all but broke United Artists (Elton says “No,” but the cause and effect were obvious. MGM bought out UA right after the debacle.) and all but ended the age of the auteur director. He made a fairly racist Chinese mobs in America movie, “Year of the Dragon,” a mob bomb “The Sicilian,” a pedestrian remake of “The Desperate Hours” and a Woody Harrelson thriller few saw, “The Sunchaser.”

Basically, the public, academia and critics had enough to go on to reconsider the perhaps over-praised “Deer Hunter,” reconsider the over-criticized “Heaven’s Gate,” and figure out that maybe he was never all that, at either extreme, and move on.

Europe and some critics may have “rediscovered” and reassessed “Heaven’s Gate.” The film is the same fascinating artifact it always was, detailed to death, dull at times and disheartening in its “honesty” of the showing the way the rich escape consequences and endure.

The last reissue of “Heaven’s Gate” for DVD removed the smokey, hazy amber tint the movie was bathed in for decades. That helped. But “masterpiece?” Come on.

The book paints a sometimes worshipful portrait of a guy Elton lets us see as a profligate poseur, a credit thief and a pathological liar.

Elton notes the “post-Cimino” Hollywood that this flop left in its wake, corporate, mostly soulless and auteur-free. But he is hellbent on exonerating the most infamous cause of that shift — the megalomanic and the messy movie he made that lost a fortune.

Elton’s book makes an interesting counterpoint to ex-UA exec Steven Bach’s “Final Cut” dissection of “Heaven’s Gate,” highlighting that contrary to myth, cast and crew considered that staggeringly-long shoot a “happy set,” even if they wore out their welcome in Kalispell, Montana and environs.

Elton doesn’t sugarcoat the primrose path that led the Oscar-winning Cimino into the “my way is the ONLY way” power trip that “Heaven’s Gate” became, a movie that cost four times what Cimino estimated it would and that ran over five hours in the first “final” cut he showed the studio.

Shades of Von Stroheim, Kubrick and others who just got carried away, bullying studio execs into succumbing to their “vision.”

But Elton doesn’t get close to Cimino the man. He lied about his age and military service, even burnished his Ivy League credentials, disconnected from family, claimed to have left a long trail of “girlfriends,” with his sometime producer and biggest fan, former agent and perhaps lover Joann Carelli, being the only one of those Elton actually met.

The elusive Carelli is the great “get” here. She’s still defending Cimino, still has a hard time saying a discouraging word about “Heaven’s Gate.”

But aside from insinuations, Elton never comes right out and says “Cimino was gay.” He quotes from a single source who has the confirmation Hollywood started gossiping about. The man lied about just about everything, perhaps the womanizing showboat — even in his young TV commercial directing day, he drove a Rolls Royce and kept it (in New York) –was lying about that, too.

We never figure out how he was able to bully supposedly hardnosed execs into getting his way. Eastwood didn’t stand for it, but everyone else did. Why? A short, sunglassed, chinless lump nicknamed “Buddha” whenever he piled on the pounds on a set, Jon Lovitz could have played Cimino had anyone chosen to make a movie about the making of “Heaven’s Gate” in the ’80s or ’90s.

UA accountant Leo Katz summed up Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” tantrum-tossing bullying’s effect, but not why it worked.

“We seem to be in the unironic and paradoxical position of not trusting the gentleman with our more and therefor insisting that he take more.”

The only real surprises in “Cimino” are the accounts of the “happy” “Heaven’s Gate” set. Elton’s read on a vindictive press going after the film because magazines and newspapers were denied access are as off as his many stumbles in trying to characterize this or that piece of Western lore or detail re: “Heaven’s Gate.” The man’s British and just hasn’t seen enough Westerns. And while the one freelancer under-cover “report from the set” story that ran in a few major newspapers may have marked the movie, the fact that the film came in a year late probably colored more people’s preconceptions.

And let’s face it. The first public screenings of “Gate” had a botched sound mix (Cimino’s fault) and a stunningly long three and a half hour-plus run time to go with dialogue that was largely incoherent. That’s where the film was tagged “disaster,” and that’s when the “This guy belongs up there with Scorsese, Coppola and DePalma” hype ended. For good.

Still, if you’ve not read any of the earlier books on Cimino’s howitzer-in-the-foot debacle, Elton’s done everyone the favor of shortening that experience and summing it up, even if he doesn’t know what barbed wire was used for or the difference between a “pitching post” and what horses are actually tied to.

“Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate and the Price of a Vision,” by Charles Elton. 348 pages, inc. index, $28. Abrams Press.

Jazz — on record, in live performance and played in studio sessions — dominates, suffuses and sets the tone of “Learn to Swim,” a dark and dreamy romance set against the Toronto jazz scene.

First-time feature director and co-writer Thyrone Tommy lets the silky smooth sounds of the music — by Chester Hansen, Tika Simone and Leland Whitty — contrast with the fragile mental state of Dezi and the fractious, boozy love life that is rarely more than a distraction for a man seemingly married to his sax.

Thomas Antony Olajide is Dezi, a brilliant player and arranger who doesn’t suffer fools or collaborators gladly. Fellow players with more drive than he has put up with a lot — indifference, rudeness and downright hostility — just to get him to show up, sit in and stay committed to their quintet’s success.

For them, it”s all about “getting signed” to a record deal.

Dezi is all about the sets and the solos, working with new vocalist Selma (Emma Ferrreira), whose spoken/sung vocal improvisations might be their big break.

But invite a guitarist to sit in without telling him, try a song in a key he didn’t designate, and on-the-spectrum temperamental Dezi shows up — or more likely, storms out.

He’s got an abscessed tooth to nurse, a drinking problem and a new neighbor (Andrea Davis) disturbing his peace — he plays records while running his instrument-cleaning side hustle. The last thing Mr. Wrapped-Too-Tight needs is a romantic entanglement. Selma? She’s sexy and fiery enough to make the sparks and Spanish profanity fly when these two hook up. It certainly makes for interesting rehearsals.

“I don’t know why you’re not getting this key. You sound like a dying mouse.”

Having history with bassist June (Andrea Pavlovic) and club barmaid Jesse (Khadijah Salawu) just makes everything messier, even as it speaks to what women who are drawn to talent will put up with from a man.

Director Tommy and co-writer Marni Van Dyk tell the story of this downbeat romance with less dialogue than music, sketching in a romance and its many distractions in scenes that can make you wonder how much of what he’s feeling and experiencing is just in the guy’s head.

It’s a slight and simple story, but the way it’s folded into the music lends it weight and scale.

Davis, playing an older woman who vexes the new tenant in her apartment building, mothers him and flirts with him, is a stand out among the supporting players.

And Canadian stage actor Olajide, who broke out with this Toronto Film Festival darling, which got him cast as one of the stars of the upcoming “Interview with the Vampire” series, makes a fascinating, obsessive jerk, an artist lost in his music but no better at managing his career than managing his romance or his alcohol intake.

His is a brooding performance that makes us come to him, the way the great ones — the ones whose acting is like great improvisational jazz — often do.

Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse

Cast: Thomas Antony Olajide, Emma Ferreira, Andrea Davis, Andrea Pavlovic and Khadijah Salawu

Credits: Directed by Thyrone Tommy, scripted by Thyrone Tommy and Marni Van Dyk. A CBC Films/Array/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

A thriller of modest budget and modest thrills, “Raven’s Hollow” gets by on funereal gloom and sheer ambition.

An American Gothic horror story filmed in Latvia, it’s a period piece about Edgar Allan Poe’s West Point years. Grounded in fantasy and bathed in realistic detail, the latest from writer-director Christopher Hatton takes him from C-movie actioners (“Battle of the Damned”) into a solid if emotionally flat B-movie/genre film.

Poe, played by “Chronicles of Narnia” alumnus William Moseley, and four other cadets from the United States Military Academy in West Point are out in farm country in the late 1820s when they come upon a disemboweled man hung up like a scarecrow.

All of them underreact to this shocking sight. But Poe’s morbid curiosity and his compassion veto the “Let’s just ride on” consensus. “We’re honor bound” to cut him down and find his kin, the already-published poet declares.

The dying man’s whispered word “raven” sends them to a most European looking settlement — half-empty– called Raven’s Hollow. That’s where Poe’s search for clues — remember, he wrote the first detective story in English — leads to suspects natural and supernatural.

Who killed this man? And what killed our comrade, as the first of the cadets is picked off?

“The Devil?” “The RAVEN!”

The locals, in an odd mix of accents, assure the soldiers “You don’t need to worry about it” and urge them to just mosey along, until one of them is killed. The soldiers aren’t buying this “raven” nonsense.

“Did the bird peck him to death?”

It’s just that they’re not policemen or anything, not knowing “how to begin” to investigate something as strange and deadly as this.

“We have ALREADY begun,” Poe declares. “If you’d pause to consider, we HAVE the answers!”

Moseley makes an inquisitive, unflappable Poe, not immune to the lure of laudanum (opium) or the poetry and prose possibilities all around him. Here’s mention of a “Lenore,” there’s an Usher (Oberon K.A. Adjepong).

And then there’s the “spirit” snatching and gutting folks left and right forevermore, The Raven.

Moseley lacks the spark, mania and lunacy that John Cusack brought to his late-life Poe in “The Raven.” The supporting cast is a mixed bag of colorful character players like Kate Dickie and David Hayman, and mostly colorless place-holders in other roles.

The effects aren’t bad, although one transformation moment plays as a lot funnier than was intended.

But even though it never lets us forget the lack of star power and modest budget, even if it never makes the leap to “compelling,” “Raven’s Hollow” is never less than an interesting effort and a good-looking argument that given the money, Hatton could show us something, with the right script.

Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: William Moseley, Kate Dickey, Melanie Zanetti, Callum Woodhouse, David Hayman, Oberon K.A. Adjepong, Callum McGowan and Mathis Landwehr.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Christopher Hatton. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:38