Movie Nation

Forget the cop-out of an anti-climax that the makers of “The Policeman’s Lineage” insisted upon, and you’ve got a decent thriller built around the struggle for a young Korean cop’s soul.

Director Lee Kyu-maan and screenwriter Bae Young-Ik set up Choi Woo-sik of “Okja” and the Oscar-winning “Parasite” as Choi, scrupulous young third generation cop trapped between two feuding superiors, each apparently worse than or at least as unethical as the other.

As one is the celebrated Det. Park, played by Cho Jin-woong of “The Handmaiden,” famous for his network of “informers” and the busts that result from them, and the other is the Internal Affairs Chief Ho (Park Hee-soon of “1987: When the Day Comes”), who sent Choi undercover to find the dirt on Park, you see the kid’s dilemma.

Add in the fact that Park was there the day Choi’s cop-dad was killed, and there are all these feelings, summed up in flashbacks to that fateful day and Choi’s cop-worshipping youth, to consider.

Even though Choi was chosen for this job thanks to his turning in and testifying against an older cop fond of torturing suspects, Park’s elite squad takes him in and Park makes the kid his driver.

What’s the wily older cop’s play here? Is he keeping somebody he should beware of close to him to monitor the new guy’s activities? Is he that careless? Or is he merely guileless because his heart is pure?

Ho is obsessed with getting his man, a “dirty cop” who is “a tumor who must be removed with a scalpel.” Ho isn’t shy about taking shortcuts to “justice” either.

But when we see Choi driving Park around in his big Mercedes, takes a look around the detective chief’s swank apartment filled with designer Gucci and Burberry fashions, and gets to ride on the boss’s big fishing boat, he and we have to wonder if Ho is right on the money.

“I knew your father” carries some weight. And Park’s reasoning — playing the big shot so that he can get close to the rich mobsters he’s pursuing (Kwon Yul and Park Myeong-hoon) –seems sound.

“We have to meet them to catch them,” he rationalizes (in Korean with English subtitles). Exclusive poker games and the like back that up.

But who is playing whom here?

The players are in fine form here, with Cho poker-faced and Choi letting us see his character’s nerves. The villains are loud and vile, and are in barely enough scenes to stand out.

Crime-film specialist Lee (“Child…”) gets our heroes and villains into some awful tussles even as the clues that point the viewer to conclusions that Choi takes forever to catch up to.

I sensed an imbalance to the screenplay, a need to build up Ho and suggest more of a tug-of-war over Choi’s loyalties and future than the film delivers. A couple of scenes show Ho’s obsession. A couple more would have helped.

And then there’s the whole “cop-out” “anticlimax” thing that takes the sting out of the finale. Boo!

Up until then, though, this is a tense, sometimes exciting police procedural dirty-cop hunt that works, that maintains some of its mystery and delivers righteous violence in just the right doses.

Rating: Unrated, violence, drug content

Cast: Cho Jin-woong, Choi Woo-sik, Hee-soon Park, Kwon Yul and Park Myeong-hoon

Credits: Directed by Lee Kyu-maan, scripted by Bae Young-Ik An Echelon release, available for sale or streaming June 7.

Running time: 1:59

“Beast” is an awkward blend of camp, over-the-top action picture and even campier over-produced production numbers featuring gorgeous stars of the Indian cinema and a sea of sexily-choreographed Indian extras.

Two and a half hours of slaughter, song and dance?

“In a situation like this,” one ineffectual official sputters (in Tamil with English subtitles) outside a mall that’s been taken over by terrorists, “did you really expect to see a terrorist’s head fly out the window?”

Yes, today’s “Around the World with Netflix” outing reminds us that there’ll always be a Bollywood.

Thalapathy Vijay and Pooja Hegde co-star in this Nelson Dilipkumar film. “Veera” is an ex-cop suffering from the mildest (most inexpressive, anyway) case of PTSD ever. An elaborately choreographed raid to shoot up dozens of terrorists to capture their leader got a little girl killed.

His “recovery” is complete when he joins an incompetent Tamilnadu (South Indian state) private security firm run by an aging lummox (Vtv Ganesh). That’s also the workplace of this beauty, Preetha (Hegde), who came on to him at a wedding (not hers) and promptly ditched her “short” and clingy fiance.

If Veera and Preetha lead the entire wedding party in a rowdy, super-sexy and riotously over-the-top dance-off, it must be love.

First day on the job? A mall that fired them as their “security” is taken over by terrorists who want to bargain for their leader’s release. Veera must stab, strangle and behead his way through the bad guys to save the day, get the girl and sing and dance happily ever after.

Two disparate genres like this are only ever mashed up on the Subcontinent. And while the singing and dancing are but bookends — there’s no twerking, popping or locking in the midst of the mayhem — large passages of this movie underscore how ill-suited they are paired-up in the same film.

Veera loudly shoots and grenades his way through minions in the film’s opening battle, while in the building next door, terrorist leaders sit quietly, discuss their plans and sip tea, not hearing the bedlam a few meters away.

The hostage incident has comic relief — two bumbling security slobs named “Jack” and “Jill” (Redin Kingsley and Yogi Babu) — and a painfully elaborate string of “Kill this guy this way” and “that guy another way” episodes, dully interrupted by what inept officials are twiddling their thumbs over outside.

It’s never as funny as it should be, nor as grimly exciting as it might have been, although there’s a giddy Fosse-meets-hip hop quality to the song and dance, and the wirework/FX-littered fights have their John Woo moments.

Vijay is more convincing as a singing actor than as a badass, and there’s no subtlety to either pose. And Hegde needs to work outside of the patriarchal Indian cinema for us to see if she’s more than a beauty who can sing and dance. Writer-director Nelson — how he bills himself, but I hear he’s considering “Lord Nelson” — gives her nothing to do here.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence aplenty

Cast: Thalapathy Vijay, Pooja Hegde, Vtv Ganesh, Yogi Babu, Redin Kingsley and Shine Tom Chacko

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nelson Dilipkumar . A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:36

Wondrous.

“Cordelia” is about a London actress of that name rehearsing King Lear’s youngest daughter, his favorite, in Shakespeare’s play.

There’s something about Cordelia — the actress, not the Bard’s “banished” for most of “King Lear” character — that seems a bit off. And no, the “character” isn’t much of a clue as to what. Again, “banished” early in the play.

Our Cordelia (Antonia Campbell-Hughes of “Split” and “Paul, Apostle of Christ”) is skittish, paranoid, and gives us the impression she’s been this way for years. She has a recurring nightmare which takes her back to “The Tube.” Something happened on London’s subway. Anybody can see that.

She’s very dependent on her twin sister and roommate Caroline (Guess who? Again?), not so much trapped in their father’s old basement flat as not quite whole when she’s away from it.

“I just want to feel normal, no ‘reminders,'” Cordelia says after bumping into an old beau on the street.

You just need to “start living in the real world, with other people in it” is Caroline’s diagnosis.

Theater might be therapy for her, and when the film about her frazzled state begins, she’s still only an understudy. So maybe they’re humoring her.

But someone is calling her flat and hanging up. Something about that dream is freaking her out.

And all of a sudden, there’s this handsome cellist Frank (Johnny Flynn) who lives upstairs, and is so disarming and charming that she finds herself kind of swept along with him — taking The Tube again, learning he named his cello “Valerie” after his first “unrequited” love, meeting him in his regular pub, only to wonder what caused him to sneak out and call her, desperate for her to take Valerie and slip out the back door.

We’re left with two puzzles in director and co-writer Anthony Shergold’s paranoid thriller. What is Cordelia’s secret? And what is Frank’s deal, anyway?

Shergold (“Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman” and TV’s “Persuasion”) makes the puzzles rather obvious before turning them in on themselves and making us second guess our first guesses.

Frank’s a trifle too charming and forward. Cordelia’s a bit too obviously unstable. Or is he? Or she?

I found “Cordelia” an intriguing, immersive mystery that left me with more questions — not about what’s really going on, but about more mundane third act specifics — than it has answers to.

Campbell-Hughes channels Charlotte Gainsbourg in this performance, taking on a sort of resting-wounded-face that begs the question of what’s going on in her head and how real and straightforward this handsome cellist could be, because she’s depressing to be around.

And Shergold makes great use of that in a thriller that doesn’t really take on classic “thriller” elements until late in the game, even as it keeps asking more questions than it answers.

Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Antonia Campbell-Hughes, Johnny Flynn, Joel Fry and Michael Gambon

Credits: Directed by Adrian Shergold, scripted by Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Adrian Shergold. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:31

Oscar-winning effects and stop-motion animation master Phil Tippett helped get “Star Wars” off the ground and won an Oscar for bringing dinosaurs back to life in “Jurassic Park.”

But for 30 years, in between “Robocop” sequels and installments in the “Twilight Saga,” he’s been working on this dense, gooey Big Statement on his art and perhaps his philosophy of life. And now “Mad God” is done and coming to the general public via Shudder.

It’s a sunglasses-at-night dark-and darker-blend of stop motion animation with bits of actors in live action scenes, with nobody talking in anything other than gibberish.

Take the title as a face-value pun and it’s a commentary on religion and life in general, as we follow a WWI gas-masked figure into an industrial wasteland underworld only a “Mad God” could conceive, where everything and everyone is consumed, chewed-up or merely randomly snuffed-out, with no sound effect spared to heighten the ickiness.

Primitive faceless slaves service — and self-sacrifice into — all-consuming steam punk furnaces. Doll-girls in chains hang from cages and grotesque monsters cast-off from “Ghostbusters” menace one and all in this Hell of Forever War, where everything and everyone is just fodder — fuel — with little clear idea who’s at the top of this nauseating “food chain.”

Maybe the doctor/mad scientist “God” of it all? He’s played by director turned actor Alex Cox (“Sid & Nancy”), the bug-eyed embodiment of “madman” or “Mad God.”

Strip away the honored credentials of the filmmaker and the tortured back story of this passion-project — something virtually no critics seem willing to do — and what we’re left with is an artist’s descent into obsession, crawling so far up his arse that nobody but him can see the light.

I’m reminded of the similarly-obsessive “The Thief and the Cobbler,” a 28-years-in-the-making hand-animated mess that grew more confused and more baroque the longer it stayed in production. The obscurant rag-doll-after-the-apocalypse animated “9” is another ready comparison here, although it made sense and was easier to follow and didn’t gestate for a third of a century.

“Incoherence” wasn’t necessarily the goal. But if it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.

Rating: unrated, gross.

Cast: Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda, Harper Taylor, Brynn Taylor

Credits: Scripted and directed by Phil Tippett. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:23

Reza Akhlaghirad wears a sullen scowl — first scene to last — in Mohammad Rasoulof’s bitter, biting indictment of life in corrupt, theocratic Iran, “A Man of Integrity.”

His character, Reza, is tested again and again, a surly and stubborn Muslim Job whose privacy, livelihood, property and civil rights are trampled on by bullying local power brokers and an indifferent bureaucracy that won’t do anything about it without the proper bribes.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare set in a suburban town where justice is bought and paid for and fighting the status quo is quixotic, and dangerous.

Reza raises goldfish. He’s mortgaged to the max, but he won’t pay the suggested bribes to assorted bank officials to avoid late fees. He’d rather sell the family car to pay whart he ownes, and let wife Hadis (Soudabeh Beizaee) take the truck to the girl’s school, where she is head teacher. “Proud” and “stubborn” go hand in hand with “integrity” as far as Reza is concerned. He’s setting an example for his young son.

But to raise and sell goldfish, he needs access to water. “The Company” isn’t intent on letting him have it, and a parade of local officials have been bought off to ensure that his protests won’t get anywhere.

An off-camera tangle with Abbas, the local enforcer of Company edicts lands them both in jail. But Reza’s grossly unequal treatment should be his last, best warning.

“Sell your land and leave,” his brother-in-law (Misagh Zare) urges. Hadis makes a short trip from “Do what you think is right” to figuring out bribes and making threats to the child of Abbas at school to realizing the futility of it all, as human-engineered calamities befall them.

“We are ruined,” she laments, in Persian with English subtitles.

There’s very little shouting in this marriage. Most debates are settled in stare-downs. But whatever the couple decides to do, every avenue of escape seems cut off and every escalation leads to deadly overreactions.

Movies and other works of art should, ideally, be considered on the merits of what’s in front of you, not the back-story of the production or trials of the filmmaker. That’s never the case, and when it comes to writer-director Rasoulof, knowing that his movies (“Manuscripts Don’t Burn”) are generally banned in Iran and that he was imprisoned for filming without permission, informs what we see on the screen.

The first scene here has Reza furtively making watermelon liquor right up to the moment the Sharia Law enforcers show up on a motorbike. Two impertinent punks search his house, take his hunting shotgun and tell him to renew the license and retrieve it “at the mosque.”

Every legitimate avenue of protest is a futile quest for “justice” that has disappeared. It’s chilling to watch, even more so when you consider the open corruption that’s moved into the spotlight, unpunished in America thanks to a bought-and-paid-for court system and utterly compromised Supreme Court.

Rasoulof doesn’t take into account the viewer’s growing frustration as we wait for intervention, retribution or revenge. In keeping many of the steps Reza finds himself forced to take off-camera, the film’s third act struggles to coherently make its points or provide logical satisfaction in its resolution.

This is maddening, and the people who have resigned themselves to it — “oppressors” and “the oppressed” — just amplify the feeling of impotence we start to share with the characters.

Through it all, Akhlaghirad makes a fine, seething muse for Rasoulof, a character who never quite gave up his student protestor past now speaking for a filmmaker who plainly never outgrew his, either.

Rating: PG-13, implied violence, drug content

Cast: Reza Akhlaghirad, Soudabeh Beizaee, Nasim Adabi, Misagh Zare, Zeinab Shabani, Zhila Shahi

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof. A Big World release.

Running time: 1:56

Impressive looking, beautifully scored and cut in ways that touch the heart…and make you forget the black mark against Ron Howard’s track record that “Willow” once was.

Nice to see Warwick Davis get another turn in his only real star vehicle.

But seriously?

We all remember hearing Tiffany Haddish talk about her hard life on her way to the big time. The daughter of a broken home, with an absent Ethiopian Jewish dad and schizophrenic mother, Haddish was homeless for stretches as she pursued her dream of comedy, fame and riches in her teens and 20s.

“Livin’ in a 1995 GEO METRO,” was a part of her stand-up act, pretty much from the start, and even after getting famous, she was talking about it in “Saturday Night Live” monologues and that disastrous New Year’s Eve show she did that kind of told her that maybe she shouldn’t bother with stand-up any more.

What we didn’t know was that a documentary filmmaker was tracking her life, and that of a couple of other comics in the same boat back then. “Comedy Confessions” sat unfinished for a long stretch and largely unseen even now. Whatever else the film has going for it, there’s all this footage of Haddish as young, skinny and as she said on stage at the time, “WAY too beautiful to be doing comedy.”

Here she is, showing us the tight squeeze that her “home,” that battered red 1995 Geo provided, driving us to the corners of Beverly Hills she’d park in to give herself a lift when “super-depressed.” Because if she parked under those trees and the cops didn’t hassle her for being “a vagrant,” she could dream that someday, she’d be rich enough to buy one of those houses.

It’s a frank and frankly amazing thing to see. We’ve heard Jim Carrey talk about being homeless in his lean years, but here’s video proof, how Haddish and comics Steven Lolli and Doc Jones lived in a Metro, a Toyota Corolla and a GMC pickup on the streets.

They’d get cleaned up at the clubs — The Laugh Factory, The Hub — where they’d perform, hitting laundromats during the day, praying for callbacks from auditions and, at the end of the night, try to find a safe place to park and sleep.

Haddish drives down Hillcrest in Beverly Hills, Lolli rolls into and describes the benefits of living in a car in the quieter portions of Culver City

They show us the logistics of their “choice,” gambling everything on a showbiz longshot because they don’t need the distraction of a “real job” and can’t scrape together “first, last and damage deposit” on the crumbs the clubs paid, then and now.

As exhausting and time-consuming as homelessness is, we see no scenes of them writing material and rehearsing new bits for their acts. Lots of stand-up footage is folded in, and it’s easy to see Haddish as the “sure thing” star in this. It’s also amazing to think of the risks they all took, her in particular. She makes clear her concerns about her own mental state, catching up with her estranged father and the hazards of being a pretty young thing in this predatory world, when ither housing “options” might present themselves to her.

“If I thought men were decent creatures,” she might accept the offer of a couch, spare bedroom or what have you, she says. But in words she’d fully expect from TH, she’s not giving up the you-know-what to have a place to crash, she tells us.

Jones, a divorced seminary graduate from Louisiana with a son he left with his parents, is more poised than exuberant — Haddish’s trademark — and every bit as funny.

Lolli has confidence, good material and bad material, and is as tough on himself as you hear the great ones always are.

Two of the three talk about their homeless status onstage, as comics do. One is more concerned about the “image” and “success” he wants to project. All three of them, or any one of the three, could have blown up. They’re all funny enough.

“Comedy Confessions” was finished in 2018, the finishing money no doubt coming from the fact that “Girls’ Trip” had made Haddish an overnight sensation. The actual filming took place @ 2008-9 (apparently), although that’s hard to pin down because the one person to give his age does what showbiz people have done since the dawn of time — he shaves maybe four or five years off.

Haddish might have given up stand-up, now that her acting career has taken off. She’s even published a memoir that’s covered some of this part of her history — “The Last Black Unicorn.”

But if she made “I was homeless” part of her brand during those open mike years, it’s great to find out just how honest she was being, just how hard it was and just how much she and everybody else in the film needed that nightly set, “comedy as therapy,” or at least a break from the discomfort, danger and shame of living hand-to-mouth-to-gas-tank.

Rating: unrated, profanity, raw language

Cast: Tiffany Haddish, Steven Lolli and Doc Jones

Credits: Directed by Gabrielle Sebastian. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:21

As “Rogue One” is the best “Star Wars” movie since the original trilogy — don’t even bother to argue — I’m actually intrigued by this.

Sort of a “beginnings of the rebellion” prequel? That’s a helluva lot more interesting than most of what Disney has been churning out under that LucasFilm Ltd. brand.

End of August.

They got a series out of this?

June 24, Rowan A. adds to his car collection.