Movie Nation

Dashing, urbane, underestated and soulful, British character actor Terence Stamp might have had a run as a matinee idol. That wasn’t the hand the movies dealt him.

So he crafted one of the most colorful careers of any of his peers, that post-Burton — O’Toole, Reed and Caine generation of British actors.

Yes, he was menacing as General Zod in the ’70s-80s “Superman” franchise. But check Stamp out as a British father hunting for answers about his daughter in Los Angeles as “The Limey.” Watch him upend the dynamic of a hostage awaiting his doom as “The Hit.”

Bathe in the glories of his dignified camp “Not f—–g ABBA” turn in “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert.”

Remember his place in “Swinging London” in “The Collector,” “Modesty Blaise” and his other ’60s roles in “Far from the Madding Crowd” and “Poor Cow.”

Stamp passed away in the UK today. He was 87.

He dated Julie Christie, turned down “Alfie,” never got but so close to James Bond, but the career he carved out and left behind is distinguished, iconoclastic and fun.

Stamp’s “comeback” years, kicked off by “The Limey,” kept my attention and when “Valkyrie” came out back in 2008, I jumped at the chance to interview him. He came off charming, thoughtful and exacting — an actor who knew characters and how to make them work within his own understated but outsized persona.

He helped make the under-rated “Last Night in Soho” a dazzling experience, play-acting in an era (The ’60s) he helped define. It the last film he made,our last chance seeing him in — just four years ago.

I have my orders this evening. So do you. Let’s find “The Limey” on Tubi or Amazon Prime or Plex and revisit one of the great one’s finest hours.

RIP.

Andrew Durham’s film — based on a memoir by Alysia Abbott (played by Emilia Jones), also stars Maria Bakalova, Adam Lambert, Eddie Murphy’s daughter Bella and Geena Davis also star in this American Zoetrope (Sofia Coppola, producing for her dad’s company) release.

This picture, like “Americana,” was slow to get distribution (premiered in 2023), and like “Americana” Lionsgate has it and we’re likely to see it in a theater near us.

This Christmas release by A24 had me straining to see if Pete Davidson and/or Adam Sandler were lower in the credits.

Because any movie, directed by Josh Safdie, built around Timothee Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Fran Drescher has GOT to have more “widely hated actors” than just those three.

Maybe “resented” is the better word. Listening to people hiss Paltrow’s appearances in the “Iron Man” movies, and getting a whiff of the entitled/insufferable blowback Chalamet inspires points to that.

And Drescher remade herself as a SAG president with some nerve, after all.

Not a big Safdie/Bronstein (“Uncut Gems” ) fan, to be honest.

But if ping pong makes a comeback, you’ll know where that came from.

Andrew Liner, Daniella Pineada, Nina Arianda, Glenn Plummer and Kevin Corrigan star in this “I wantcha to hit yer GRANDPA” and “It’s swimmin’ around in your DNA” boxing film.

Vertigo Releasing has it, so very limited theatrical window starting Sept. 12, followed by VOD, etc.

Love that Tim Blake. Looks good.

There have been worse Tarantino rip-offs than “Americana,” a modern Northern Plains Western with hints of “Reservoir Dogs” and “Pulp Fiction” about it.

And hot starlet of the moment Sydney Sweeney’s not the worst thing in it.

Ok, maybe she is, not quite managing her best shot at playing a stammering shrinking violet waitress with Nashville dreams. But that’s still no reason to bury the film, which is ungainly and sloppily constructed but often watchable.

It’s got greed and big hats and bolo ties and big delusional dreams, cultural appropriation and a patriarchal cult compound and all sorts of armed people willing to kill to get what they want without fearing much in the way of consequences.

So yeah, the title’s on-the-money.

Lower the body count, raise the comic quotient and throw away the out-of-order “Pulp Fiction” story structure and it might have worked.

The writing-directing debut of Tony Tost, who wrote for TV’s “Longmire” and “Damnation,” the picture’s about an “artifact” — a Lakota Sioux “ghost shirt” — and a motley collection of South Dakota strivers who covet it.

There’s the hustler Western museum owner and dealer in “Native artifacts” Roy Lee Dean (Simon Rex of “Red Rocket”) who engages lowlife Fun Dave (Joe Adler) and lower-life Dillon (Eric Dane) to steal it.

A Native American militant group led by the Karl Marx-quoting Ghost Eye (Zahn McLarnon) get wind of that robbery.

And a shy, stammering waitress (Sweeney) enlists a lonesome, “slow” combat-vet pony rancher (Paul Walter Hauser of “Naked Gun”) to spy on the robbery plans with an eye towards grabbing that priceless shirt and selling it to make her dreams come true.

Thug Dillon’s Joan Jett-haired girlfriend (Halsey) has her own plans for the shirt and its payout.

But her delusional little boy (Gavin Maddox Bergman), besotted by old Westerns, has decided he’s Chief Sitting Bull reincarnated. What might he do to protect his mom and return that shirt “to my people?”

As the shirt skates off into the sunset in the trunk of Dillon’s rattle-can bright orange ’72 Monte Carlo, the chase is on, with everybody playing the hand they’re dealt and the angles that present themselves to them.

Speaking from experience, I’d say follow that Monte Carlo until it vapor locks, which it sure as shooting will as soon as the engine gets hot enough. But that’d make for a more boring, less bloody movie.

The lightest hearted scenes have McLarnon’s Ghost Shirt reveal that’s not his birth name while lecturing the “reincarnated” kid that “this isn’t exactly the golden age of ‘cultural appropriation'” and just where his “red-faced minstrel” show claims will get young Calvin if runs into less tolerant Lakota than himself.

Attempts to make fun of Hauser’s loneliness and passion for proposing to any single woman he meets fall flat.

And once the heist is on and the rich blowhard (Toby Huss) who has the shirt and his dinner party are interrupted by a home invasion, the picture turns irretrievably violent and whatever sentimental charm was possible vanishes.

The singer Halsey does a decent job with the most interesting character, a woman who’s spent years in classic rock T-shirts and hair, but whose past is a reminder of the sexist Christo-fascist cults all over the West.

Rex is properly vile, Dane his usual white-haired hardcase and Hauser adds another lumpy loser to his collection.

Sweeney doesn’t have to carry this picture, but carrying her weight isn’t easy with a character who starts out a caricature and then breaks from that so severely that we don’t really know who Penny Jo is, just that her mother’s (Harriet Sansom Harris) a generic and bitter dream killer.

The cold-bloodedness of it all suggests a harder-nosed thriller of the “Hell or High Water” school was what Tost had in mind. But he tries to soften that up with sentiment, and the plot and tone never coalesce around that compromise.

In the years since this picture’s premiere, Sweeney has become a hot property, which is why “Americana,” formerly titled “National Anthem,” is worth releasing.

But even Lionsgate knows what they’ve got here doesn’t quite play, which is why they dumped it onto the Island of Misfit Movies — a release date in mid-to-late August.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: Sydney Sweeney, Halsey, Paul Walter Hauser, Zahn McLarnon, Simon Rex, Gavin Maddox Bergman and Eric Dane.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tony Tost. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:47