Movie Nation

A glum and faintly horrific bit of sci fi coming our way Sept. 30.

Eddie Marsan is the one recognizable face I see here, with Raffiella Chapman as our 13 year old title heroine.

The dreamy sci-fi romance “We Are Living Things” might have been pitched as a “two people who have experienced UFO abductions” “the truth is out there” mystery.

But the abductions depicted here are more mundane and down to Earth. The whole “search for aliens” business turns out to be a lot less interesting than you might hope or expect. The thing is, the filmmakers figured that out, too, and a quiet, somber romance spins out of shared trauma and “belief.”

As a rule, I’m fonder of movies that have a bit more going on. But this odd, moody movie in a minor key has a mesmerizing quality that engages in different ways.

Jorge Antonio Guerrero (“Roma”) is Solomon, an illegal alien with a thing for space aliens. He’s in New York, an undocumented laborer who works and lives, in a open shed out back, a scrapyard. By day he sorts metals and crushes cans, or takes care of building maintenance at the half-ruined flophouse the owners run down the street. By night, he’s out metal detecting, look for magnetic rocks and “evidence.”

A striking Chinese woman (Xingchen Lyu of “Wisdom Tooth”) gets his attention and gives him a deja vu feeling of connection. When he fixes her plumbing in the flop house, he spies UFO photos and a magnetic rock and wonders if she’s a kindred spirit.

He stalks Chuyao to her day job in a manicure shop, and her after hours work as the “date” of some hustler named Tiger (Zao Wang) who must have been the person who smuggled her into the U.S. She’s as creeped-out as you might expect anyone being stalked to be. But the whole Tiger arrangement seems unsavory and dangerous, and even Solomon abducting her seems almost reasonable.

That’s when she figures out what they have in common, when she sees his DIY electronic efforts to listen in to whatever’s “out there” in space and when she develops feelings for this enterprising immigrant who, like her, has first-hand knowledge of whatever goes on when people say they’ve had “Communion” with beings from flying saucers.

The blessing here is how little the film and its dialogue are concerned with that UFO hook. What’s more interesting is how this out-of-sorts Chinese woman learns to trust this Mexican who proves to us long before he proves to her that he’s got her best interests at heart.

The leads are an intriguing contrast, each getting across a performance that doesn’t really spell out “character” or advance the story all that much. Lyu and Guerrero sell “mysterious” and “romantic” in understated ways.

“We Are Living Things” is more a movie of feelings than plot or explanations of that plot and the characters. And as such, dark as it sometimes gets, it’s a winner. It’s too slight to oversell or hype. But as long as you see it or stream it without expecting “Signs” to pop up and scare you to do death or “E.T.” to phone home, it makes a pleasantly diverting romance with just enough science fiction in it to merit the label.

Rating: unrated, violence, drugs

Cast: Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Xingchen Lyu, Zao Wang and O-Lan Jones.

Credits: Directed by Antonio Tibaldi, scripted by Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:36

I see from a quick search of posts here that I published the trailers to “The Informer,” another “undercover in the joint” thriller, but never got around to reviewing it during its brief theatrical run.

Guessing that was because of how similar it is to the Nikolaj Coster-Waldau thriller “Shot Caller,” which I wasn’t nuts about and which came out not that long before it.

But the trade offs in leads — Joel Kinnaman of “Suicide Squad” instead of “Game of Thrones” hunk Coster-Waldau — is more than offset by a sparkling supporting cast, which in “Informer” includes Rosamond Pike, Common, Clive Owen and a pre-fame poodle-haired Ana de Armas. The violence is more visceral even if the plot is loopier, with a third act that’s just “out there.”

The players, the hopeless situation and one killer scene make this the better movie to me. Let me see if I can make my case.

Kinnaman plays an ex-con/informant who is setting up a Polish mob kingpin in New York when things go sideways on the day of the “meet.” Even though Peter Koslow was careful enough to sew in his own “wire,” even though he did his part, listened to his FBI handler (Pike) when she said “Stay cool and we’ll be all right,” and followed protocols, an NYPD cop got killed.

He didn’t kill him, and even though the fact that the cop stumbled into their sting thanks to a bumbling punk relative of “The General” (Eugene Lapinski), Koslow is the one who owes the mob “a debt,” the one who owes the Feds their sting. He’ll just have to arrange that from inside Bale Hill, the prison he’s been sent back to.

Wife Sofia (de Armas) and daughter? Won’t the Feds whisk them away? And the warden, won’t he have our recidivist inmate’s back for his snitching? Not if Pike’s character’s boss (Owen) has any say.

“Burn him.”

And then there’s the NYPD cop (Common) whose undercover drug buyer was murdered. He’s annoyingly relentless, and in ways that seem to benefit neither the Feds nor the Koslows.

The intrigues are breathless and the violence so in your face that it takes a seriously off-key third act to make this one more a mixed bag than it was setting up to be.

Kinnaman’s terrifically poker-faced. He may be playing a combat vet, a “sniper” (lazy-assed screenwriters), but he’s no superman stuck behind bars with his mental; and physical inferiors. Skinny Kinnaman makes us fear for Koslow’s safety and wonder if he has the wits to wriggle out of this death trap.

A killer moment involves a hanging. Other blasts of violence are just as intimate, even as the “How do we get him outta this?” part of three tag-team screenwriting falls to pieces in the finale.

Worth a look? This cast guarantees it, and one adrenalin-rush hanging scene sells it.

Rating: R (Strong Violence|Pervasive Language)

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Clive Owen, Ana de Armas, Common and Eugene Lapinski.

Credits: Directed by Andrea Di Stefano, scripted by Matthew Cook, Rowan Joff and Andrea Di Stefano. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:53

It just passed “Titanic” on the all time cinema blockbusters list, has been “the movie event” of the year, in terms of box office, and Disney and MGM are putting major releases out on streaming only.

So why not a “fan appreciation weekend” for Tom Cruise’s biggest hit ever? The screens are available.

“Maverick” returns to the biggest theaters in America this weekend, for those with a “need for speed” and a Jones for a big action fix.

Today’s Around the World with Netflix outing is a minimalist, just-nasty-enough burglary-gone-wrong tale from Kenya.

“Nairobby,” the debut feature by writer-director Jennifer Gatero, is a “Reservoir Dogs” style no-budget heist picture in which there are no flashbacks to the actual “heist.” It’s set almost entirely in the aftermath, with accusations, backstabbing, betrayals and threats coming as the robbers try to reason out what went wrong.

Five college kids meet in an abandoned building, most in near-hysterics about who “the guards saw” and why “the alarm went off,” when their inside woman, Tasha (Lorna Lemi) “had the codes,” and what they’re going to do when their sixth member, Nick (Martin Gathoga) shows up, bleeding out from a terrible gash in his leg.

They had big plans, it turns out, to “distribute” their college’s scholarship money which they’re sure their corrupt dean will spend on a new Range Rover. It’s what he (Jack Chage) always does, raise money for “disadvantaged students” like most of them, and then buy himself a new car with the cash.

Vivian (Jeritah Mwake), her beau Yobra (Sanchez Ombasa), beret-clad hothead Oti (Neville Ignatius), med student Kama (Martin Ndichu), Tasha and Nick figured they’d use the money, stashed in the dean’s office, the way the dean said it would be used — for tuition.

But 37 million Kenyan shillings has them thinking other thoughts — of raising this one’s daughter elsewhere, of fleeing to Zanzibar and opening a seafood shack one wants to name “Frying Nemo.”

It’s just that Nick is bleeding out, his dad might be mob connected and med student Kama is as useful as a spoon, when what they need is a hospital.

Romantic entanglements, lies, a hidden pistol and recriminations follow as the clock ticks down on the sirens they hear closing in on them.

“I spread lies the way you spread your legs!” (in Swahili, with a bit of English patois thrown in).

Gatero, who appears on camera as a TV newscaster summing up the robbery, throws a lot of melodramatic manipulations into all this, characters shifting from panic and grief to lusty “love the one you’re with” changes in allegiances in an abrupt flash.

But she’s made a tight, suspenseful thriller peppered with flinty, repetitive, David Mamet-style dialogue, as if these college kids are all film students and know their “Heist” and “Reservoir Dogs” references.

“Nairobby” may not be an instant classic. It’s still a sharp enough opening outing to be worth a look and easily earns that second check Netflix should write to give us more gritty tales from Kenya from this very promising first-time director.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Lorna Lemi, Jeritah Mwake, Neville Ignatius, Sanchez Ombasa, Martin Gathoga, Jack Chage and Martin Ndichu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jennifer Gatero. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:17

This Indonesian gangland thriller “Preman” has the most badass villain’s henchman ever. His name is Ramon. He speaks French, and refers to himself in the third person.

“Ramon does not like cussing.”

Ramon keeps scissors and other hair care accessories — some of them lethal — in his leather salon holster. Ramon is a killer, and a hairdresser, and you’d better not cuss him or sling gay slurs his way. Because Ramon will CUT a bitch, and remind you that “Ramon’s sexual orientation is none of your business!”

Remember, Ramon is not the hero or anti-hero of this violent quest tale. He’s just a henchman. But when you’re building your movie around a deaf gangster trying to save his headstrong child from murderers, a fellow whose weapon of choice is a “monkey fist,” you’d better have somebody seriously colorful lined up against him.

“Preman” is titled “Preman: Silent Fury” for international release to separate it from other Indonesian gangster films. “Preman” are low-rent thugs, enforcers for assorted political or monied interests, the muscle that clears villages wanted for redevelopment or ensures political power in ways the corrupt, ineffectual, outmanned police cannot.

Sandi (Farell Akbar) has grown up in the gang, wearing the officially-provided shirts and pretending to listen to the harangues of the gang boss, Guru (Kiki Narendra), who works for a fat-cat politician. Sandi “pretends” to listen because he lost his hearing in some childhood accident or trauma.

Might his nightmares, which involve tangles with people in fuzzy cartoon animal suits, explain that?

When the gang is ordered to clear the settlement that’s grown up around an orphanage/school for the poor, run by the sage Haji (Egy Fedly), Sandi must take a side. Haji raised him after he went deaf, and Haji insists that Sandi take his son (Muzakki Ramdhan) and seek a better life for the kid.

The movie is about what happens when you don’t take a sage’s advice. Because Haji is threatened, but defiant. And Sandi’s boy Pandu is a tough little kid — bullied but hellbent on fighting back.

“When are you going to teach me to use the ‘monkey fist?'” the kid wants to know.

Dad’s secret weapon in a gang world where guns are rare and machetes, daggers and clubs, some wrapped in barbed wire, are the preferred and much more intimidating weapons of choice, is a ball on a rope.

When the Sandi and Pandu try to save Haji and run afoul of the gang, Guru sends for “The Barber.” Let’s let Ramon, the badass, vested and goateed barber from Jakarta, describe (in Indonesian) what his quarry is carrying.

A Monkey Fist is “a high velocity flail, with a blunt weight on its end, generating impact through centripetal force!”

You go, Ramon!

All Sandi has to do is spin it and whip it and skulls crack, teeth shatter and foes fall to the floor. Of course, it’s not the perfect weapon. If a mob is brave enough to come at him in numbers, or if the fight is in a confined space, he might not have room to whip it, whip it real good.

One of the many cool elements to “Preman” is how many people in Sandi’s life know sign language. Even when he and the multi-lingual dandy Ramon (Revaldo, in a movie-stealing performance) throw down, his foe knows how to sign his threats and trash talk.

The movie’s simple quest structure — a father struggling to get his rebellious, short-tempered child to safety — is somewhat muddied by the “fuzzies” flashbacks, and clumsy third act efforts to over-explain Sandi’s deafness and the ugly personal failing that caused it.

But for a movie with wanton violence and cruelty, with a compromised cop (Gilbert Pattiruhu) forced to watch a gang rape (not shown) as punishment and characters who weep at the loss of loved ones, it’s also darkly funny.

Punctuate an off-camera gang-rape scene with an emasculatingly “comical” confession of sexual dysfunction. Have a guy slur He Who will NOT be Slurred, Ramon, and see what he gets for it.

For all its universal action movie tropes, “Preman” is very much a product of its culture, some of it less palatable to Western eyes. But it’s a dashing writing/directing debut by that cinematic rarity, a sound guy (boom operator to editor) who moved up to directing.

And writer-director Randolph Zaini, playing around with narrative structure and even joking around with the (aspect ratio) frame in a few scenes, announces himself as an Indo-Action (just made that up) filmmaker to watch, another reminder that Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Thailand aren’t the only places in Asia that could teach Hollywood a thing or two about how to spice up a thriller.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence

Cast: Farell Akbar, Emil Kusumo, Kiki Narendra, Muzakki Ramdhan, Gilbert Pattiruhu, Putri Ayudya, Salvita Decorte and Revaldo

Credits: Scripted and directed by Randolph Zaini. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:32

The Taiwanese drama “Reclaim” is something of an upside down “Joy Luck Club.”

It’s not about Chinese American immigrants, or daughters who come to realize all that their Chinese mothers went through to get them better lives. Writer-director CJ Wang instead takes us into “Stella Dallas” martyrdom, wandering through an under-appreciated mother’s life, framed by the things her own never-praising/never-encouraging mother never did for her.

Lan-hsin, played by Yi-Ching Lu (“Stray Dogs”) has run an art studio day care for kids for over 30 years. Her love of art may have been reduced to delicately painting the tiny items in the school’s tastefully decorated doll house, but the work was steady and it helped her and her husband provide for their college-educated kids and paid for an apartment big enough for them, even big enough to take her father-in-law in during his final years.

But Lan-hsin comes home not to an empty or particularly clean house. Her layabout retiree husband David (Shih-Hsun Kou) literally will not lift a finger to clean it. He wants to know what’s for breakfast/lunch/dinner, passing on “remember not to” instructions for whatever they’re having. He’s pulled mountains of her books and the likes off the shelves, figuring they’ll have more room if her stuff is out of the way, “tossed.”

David? He’s a hoarder — teapot collectibles he’s sure will appreciate in value, busted appliances he won’t fix, artwork created by his dad, etc.

A guy who won’t clean up a mess he’s made on the toilet or return the milk he’s just taken from the fridge can’t be expected to not be a burden, not at this stage. It’s like expecting him to not monopolize the TV.

Her chilly, combative mother (Hee Ching Paw) is slipping into dementia, sneaking out of her nursing home and getting lost, “confused.” It’d be better if she moved in with them.

Even getting a “Where would she stay?” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) out of David seems like too much to ask. He pays his wife that little mind.

When we meet his flighty, self-absorbed sister, hear her latest “next big thing” business scheme (high end cemetery sites for ancestral ashes to rest in eternity) and see her, too, impose on the ever-imposed upon Lan-hsin, we wonder if it’s genetic.

All information in the family is filtered through “reasonable” mom, as David’s dismissiveness and knee-jerk reactions to every misstep have made their architect/planner daughter (Chia An-yu) and expat college teacher in America son wary of telling him that she has quit her job, broken up with her boyfriend and is moving back in with them, and that the son and his wife are considering moving back to Taiwan, abandoning their expensively-won academic careers to take over his wife’s family farm out in the country.

One thing we pick up, and quickly, is how their kids have inherited Dad’s selfish self-absorption and willingness to dump literally every chore, tiny task or inconvenience onto their mother.

“Mom, have you booked our FLIGHTS yet?” “There’s a delivery for me downstairs, would you get it? And can you spot me ($460) to pay for it COD?”

We see. We absorb. We get hints of the life, career and travels Lan-hsin wanted for herself, which her mother dismissed, discouraged and blocked.

And as Lan-hsin enterprisingly sets out to find a new home big enough for all of them to live, if need be, we wonder if she will snap, if this selfless woman will “Reclaim” something for herself from this family that’s leaned on her for decades.

“When people are selfless, all of their potential can be realized,” she’s been taught. Too bad nobody she’s related to learned the same lesson.

Writer-director Wang, making her feature filmmaking debut, lets scenes and shots linger past their payoff, which makes “Reclaim” drag along, a tale with 95 minutes of incidents, minor (and perhaps imagined) crises and apartment hunting that plays out in 124.

The complain-to-her-mother framing device makes one question the nature of some of the calamities that pile up on our heroine. Is some of this an alternate timeline, with an ungrateful daughter deciding that mom’s limiting choices are actually what gave her life value?

That means we’ve wasted a lot of time shouting at the screen, wanting this downtrodden woman to chew out her kids and throw things at her stunningly narcissistic husband.

Interesting subtexts here depict Taiwanese family expectations, “ingratitude” as the ultimate sin, note duty to one’s parents and dip into the gambling nature of the culture. Everybody’s looking for a scheme, the next shortcut to riches. We can see the traps. Sometimes, Lan-hsin can, too.

But the slow pacing and sidebars tend to muddle the messaging and make one wonder just what the hell the message is? Stick up for yourself? Be “selfless” so that you can best serve your family? Beware get rich quick schemes?

The mixed-bag “Reclaim” turns out to be doesn’t hide the fact that there’s a tighter, more impactful movie in this material, a common complaint with overlong made-for-Netflix productions. Indulging the filmmaker, like a mother indulging her kids for too long, doesn’t do anybody any good.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Yi-Ching Lu, Shih-Hsun “Johnny” Kou, Chia An-yu, Hee Ching Paw and Mason Lee

Credits: Scripted and directed by CJ Wang. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:04

One of the stranger film’s of Robert Altman’s vagabond career, and perhaps the least “Altmanesque,” is a small-cast horror tale shot on an Irish location, barely released in the U.S. and “lost” for decades — supposedly because Columbia Pictures destroyed its negative.

But “Images” starred Susannah York, who earned a co-writing credit for reading from her children’s fantasy novel “In Search of Unicorns,” something Altman worked into his long-gestating screenplay. It was photographed by no less than Vilmos Zsigmond, scored by John Williams and littered with eerie “Sounds” by Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta.

And as it got lost in the shuffle (and American distributor Columbia’s shenanigans) of Altman’s break out years — right after “M*A*S*H” and mixed in with “Brewster McCloud,” “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” “Thieves Like Us” and “The Long Goodbye” — it’s certainly worth a look.

The idea, Altman said later, was to make something in the French New Wave style, a sort of “Belle du Jour” or “Repulsion” thriller with nods to “Persona.” Altman was a TV craftsman who longed to be thought of as “an artist,” so his impulse was to go “obscure.”

York plays a writer of YA-before-it-was-YA lit married to a boor (Rene Auberjonois of “M*A*S*H”) of indeterminate employ, assorted hobbies (still-life art photography, hunting) and a goofy penchant for wearing driving gloves in and out of the car, in and out of the house.

“Cathryn” is another classic York shag-haircut beauty who comes somewhat unglued thanks to a late night call — or what she perceives as a call. She’s chatting with a friend when a “crossed line” (land-line speak) brings in the voice of another woman, a stranger.

“Do you know where your husband is tonight?”

Cathryn comes a tad unglued, and her ill-tempered, foul-mouthed husband Hugh can’t make much sense of it. We can’t decide if a couple of badgering, taunting calls have unmoored her, if this is a new state or if Hugh has a clue that his writer-wife is somewhat...off.

At her insistence, they dash off to her inherited place in the country (County Wicklow) where she can work on her book and he can play at being the great hunter.

Once there, they run into their newly-divorced old friend Marcel (Hugh Millais), who comes on to Cathryn as if he’s sure she’ll be receptive to this again, Marcel’s teen daughter Susannah (Cathryn Harrison) and this other fellow.

It’s only when Rene (Marcel Bozzuffi, note everybody’s name-and-character name), who seems to be an ex-lover, with anecdotes about a false pregnancy and the like, is told to “Shut up! You’re dead, STAY dead!” by Cathryn that the mystery really unravels.

She’s seen another version of herself, with a cocker spaniel (she fears dogs), drive up to the house as she looks down on it from a nearby hillside. Plainly, not everyone Cathryn sees is real. Not every personality trait we attribute to her is her own.

“Schizophrenic,” Marcel jokes, in the broad misdiagnosis of the day. She might agree, but it’s obvious Hugh has no clue. She’s not in treatment and apparently undiagnosed. The movie is about her response to these visions and her self-prescribed treatment.

Altman’s sometimes piggish misuse of women in “M*A*S*H” and elsewhere is echoed here. His playfulness with names and character names probably looked student filmish to Columbia, which picked up “Images” from Hemdale. And his frequent repetition of lines as character crutches might be another Altmanesque touch, for those looking for the telltale talkover dialogue, clutter of characters and repertory company Altman trademarks.

Hugh’s swearing always begins with “Son of a BITCH,” and Cathryn’s vocalized pause, applied to any situation she wants to get out of — a child’s unfiltered questioning, a masher’s crude attempts at seduction, a stranger at the door — is “I’m cold.”

Obscure as our storyteller tries to make “Images,” it’s easy enough to pick up on what’s happening. York, in what might be her most mercurial performance, runs the gamut from passive to alarmed, enraged to lost in a reverie, often in the same scene.

She was pregnant and Altman insisted on keeping his planned nude scene as a “Rubenseque” jolt and joke. No, people weren’t as fit in the early ’70s (look at the lumpy men), but that was still a daring move for the sex symbol York (“Tom Jones”) to agree to.

Thanks to Altman’s fondness for profanity (and the stunningly creepy sound design/musical effects of Yamashta), “Images” sounds remarkably modern, even if the sexual mores, fashion and evocatively grainy, drab celluloid greys of an Irish fall give it a period piece feel.

Thanks to its pedigree and York’s performance, “Images” is well worth tracking down on the TV streamers that have picked it up, especially if you’re an Altman completist. But its oddness is both a calling card and a handicap, as it’s not quite horror, not entirely a paranoid thriller and not necessarily “Altmanesque.”

Rating: R, violence, sex, nudity

Cast: Susannah York, Rene Auberjonois, Hugh Millais, Marcel Bozzuffi, Cathryn Harrison and John Morley

Credits: Scripted and directed by Robert Altman, with York reading from her novel “In Search of Unicorns.” A Hemdale release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:41

Mostly bad to indifferent news at the box office this weekend.

“Nope” is already losing screens. “The League of Super-Pets” is treading water. The only “star comedy” of the summer, the mis-timed “Easter Sunday,” reveals that there is no audience for a Jo Koy laugher, even one with Tiffany Haddish in a sharp and funny cameo.

A marginal Thursday and passable Friday ($12.6 million) pushed Brad Pitt’s jovial and bloody Sony action comedy “Bullet Train” to a 30 million opening.

The studios didn’t do the theater owners any favors this weekend, showing two perfectly marketable and good genre pics — Ron Howard’s “Thirteen Lives” for MGM/Amazon and the 20th Century Pictures “Predator” prequel “Prey” — directly onto Amazon Prime and Hulu, respectively.

I figure they left $25-30 million on the table, just from opening weekend takes, with those two and left the multiplexes high and dry. The two films could have made money into Sept., $100 million between them split with the hard-up movie theaters.

“Easter Sunday” opened wide and barely cleared $5 million. Ouch.

On its second weekend, “Super-Pets” is clearing $10.8-11 and will jog past the $50 million mark next week. Schools are about to open and there’s no sugar coating how limply this one performed. It won’t hit $70.

“Nope” did another $8 million this weekend, and will be in the $100 million club by early next week. Not a blockbuster, not a bomb either. As much as it cost, it will end up barely breaking even, US, International and post theatrical

“Thor: Love & Thunder” have not have been a fan favorite, but it’s over $315 million, thanks to $7.5 this weekend.

“Minions: The Rise of Gru” added another $7 million, and it’s sitting pretty at $334, probably heading to $350 by end of summer.

“Top Gun: Maverick” passed “Titanic” on the all-time box office blockbuster list ($662 million in North America alone).

“Where the Crawdads Sing” is hanging around, losing small chunks of its audience each week. A $5.2 million weekend edges it closer to the $70 million mark (crossing that next week).

“Elvis” may yet make it to the $150 million mark in North America with one more decent weekend after this weekend’s $3.72 million. This was a big hit, here and abroad people. Elvis is still The King.

“Black Phone” gets one more weekend in the Top Ten and will finish its run in the $90-93 million range, clearing the $150 million make worldwide.

Visionary writer-director Terry Gilliam‘s “Quixotic” thirty year pursuit of getting his idea for a Don Quixote movie on screen ended a couple of years ago when “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” finally premiered and went on to a desultory and dispirited big screen release.

After all the many incarnations of the cast, with Robert Duvall and Ewan McGregor and John Hurt on board different iterations, and Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort on set and shooting when a 2000 version of it fell apart six days into production, a debacle documented in “Lost in La Mancha,” the film itself felt like a competently-done afterthought, an anti-climax starring Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver.

But what does that make the follow-up documentary about it that the “Lost in La Mancha” team filmed, “He Dreams of Giants?”

Gilliam has chuckled and explained away to me and other interviewers the decades of “bad luck” that made him feel like a “cursed” filmmaker. His studio had to be bullied into releasing “Brazil,” others simply sold finished films (“The Brothers Grimm”) to another distributor or released and abandoned “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.” Co-star Heath Ledger died just as “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” — his last widely-acclaimed, widely-seen movie — was winding up filming.

But seven different times “Man Who Killed Don Quixote” was a “go” picture. And when filming got underway in Spain in 2000, NATO bombing range flyovers, torrential rains and an infirm star (Rochefort) seemed to put an end to a dream the cartoonist, Monty Python wit and “Twelve Monkeys” director had harbored since the late ’80s.

Talk about “cursed.”

Pepe and Fulton, occasionally casting questions Gilliam’s way off camera on the set of a movie being attempted with half the already-thin budget of nearly 20 years before, document a reflective wizened Gilliam, stressed, still forcing out a laugh, still summoning up some enthusiasm as he stubbornly gets this movie monkey off his back at last.

“Art is hard,” he grins. The idea that it should be fun…who the f— came up with that?”

He reads from his beautiful, ancient Gustave Doré illustrated copy of Miguel Cervantes’ novel — “Too much sanity may be madness… But the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

He compares his quest to that of his idol, Federico Fellini whose “8 1/2” (sampled here) became a mad, dreamy movie “without an ending” about making a movie without having an ending.

Gilliam is on the phone talking about financing even after production has started, laments that “the marketplace has no faith in this film” and we see clips of “Tidelands” and “The Zero Theorem,” movies he made which virtually no one saw.

Gilliam either sits with meditative patience in his director’s chair, animatedly sprints through what he wants his co-star, Driver, to do or downloads a year’s worth of f-bombs about “losing our light” or “losing a day” or “falling behind.” Only his intrepid director of photography, Nicola Pecorini, can talk him down.

But not by walkie talkie. Gilliam can’t get the damned things to work and jogs 100 yards or more to pass on another last minute instruction.

Before this shoot was over with, the man was wearing a catheter, was pushing 80, and looked it.

“More foolish and stupid than heroic,” he grumps of this exercise.

With many of those cast as his aged title character too infirm to finish, dying before shooting started (Hurt) or simply dropping out (Duvall, the only horseman of the lot), star Pryce is a good sport in declaring that his “Brazil” director “was just waiting for me to get old enough to play Don Quixote.

Driver, bless him, isn’t a “box office” star but was and is a big enough name to get the film financed, shot and released, and deserves any “what a trouper” accolades thrown his way. But he didn’t talk to the documentary filmmakers, or didn’t give permission for them to use any interviews for the finished film. That’s not exactly an endorsement of the experience or the finished product.

It would be nice if this generally laudatory, understated and reflective film served as Gilliam’s victory lap. It captures his dogged persistence and his artist’s eye, and humanizes him by letting us see him playing with his son in home movies, then playing with his grandchild in others. He got “Quixote” finished, got a standing ovation at Cannes for accomplishing that, and can now sit back and be interviewed about his career and films or Python or his favorite artists, a grand old man of the arts.

But Old Man Gilliam, like one other aged Python, keeps sticking his foot in it with this or that public statement (or being #MeToo’d by actresses on Twitter) and whining about being “canceled” for it. If he’s not careful, that’s what he’ll be remembered for and not “Time Bandits,” “Brazil,” “Twelve Monkeys” and “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”

“Cursed” or not, it’s hard to not see a pattern here, and hard not to feel that his greatest fear for “Quixote,” that he’d “disappoint the fans,” actually came true.

Rating: unrated, profanity and lots of it

Cast: Terry Gilliam, Nicola Pecorini, Joana Ribeiro, Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce

Credits: Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. A Bohemia Media release.

Running time: 1:25