Movie Nation

“Playhouse” is a stylish British ghost story with a great, gloomy Scottish setting, and little else to recommend it.

It’s not frightening, rarely suspenseful and never comes close to the harrowing experience audiences have come to expect from horror movies these days. It’s all squandered opportunities and dull substitutions for our best guesses as to where it will go next.

But the set up is solid gold. A grumpy teen (Grace Courtney) and her Dad (William Holstead) have relocated from London to this seaside Scottish “castle.” It’s one of those homely manor houses that used to be a castle, victim of a drab Dickensian makeover or two over the decades.

But Dad, Jack Travis, has big plans for it. He’s the “horropreneur” of The West End, a successful playwright who has a mind to turn this place into an immersive theatrical experience, “the living play,” he calls it. He’s so deep into the idea that he’s talking to the dead son of the late laird of the manor.

“We’ll show them, won’t we, Alastair?”

Daughter Bee sees all the news-clippings on Dad’s bulletin board, even if she doesn’t overhear him improvising dialogue around the place’s unfortunate history. People have died, an aristocratic family left secrets and perhaps unfortunate members buried in the wall.

Bee, just finishing school, invites classmates over for a spooky evening of drinks, candles and wild tales of the place. They egg each other on until they’ve laid hands upon “the wall,” an exposed part of the older incarnation of the “castle,” where you can still “hear Alastair…the laird’s son” screaming if you touch it.

The girls might not have played this “game” had they known “Bee” is short for “Beleth,” one of the “Kings” (or queens) of Hell.

Can I mention what an utter bust this scene is, dramatically?

Jenny (Helen Mackay) is a curious neighbor who grew up down the lane. She and husband Callum (James Rottger) may be here to tidy up granny’s old place to sell it. But the history of “the castle” tugs at her, and pretty soon they’re having a tetchy dinner with the Travis’s.

What are the secrets this spooky place will draw out of our principals? And what secrets does the castle have for those who dare to dwell there as they hunt for actors and financing for a theatrical theme-park style spooktactular?

Holstead, of “The Burying Party,” has precious little to play here. Jack has to be off his rocker to think he’ll lure people to the middle of nowhere to experience his “living play.” He hints that he expects folks to want to move there just to be a part of this thing. Holstead doesn’t give us much that says “madness.”

Courtney’s “Bee” is all sullen and bangs, and the movie loses track of her for most of the second half. So no help there.

And Mackay and Rottger, playing a couple who aren’t on the same page, with ties to the spooky house that aren’t mysterious or shocking, don’t add much to the proceedings. Something draws Callum to Jack, but there’s no hint of the house putting him under its spell, just as there’s too little of that where Jack is concerned as well.

So what we’re left with is a fumbling, groping and almost wholly-unsatisfying thriller set in a towering old house near the water’s edge, where the wind howls and there’s a shock, fright or laugh behind every tree.

Except that it being Scotland, there’re no bleeding trees.

MPA Rating: unrated, horror imagery, profanity

Cast: William Holstead, Grace Courtney, Helen Mackay, James Rottger

Credits: Written and directed by Fionn Watts and Toby Watts. A Devilworks release.

Running time: 1:26

There’s a moment, after we’ve seen an hour of the stoic Swedish teen Greta Thunberg start a global climate movement, meet with world leaders and agree to every “selfie” asked of her by fans along the way, when we get a taste of just what this activism has cost her.

It’s not in the scary “security” briefing and first aid refresher course her dad, Svante, gets after the death threats start. And it doesn’t come the first time she expresses dismay and even outrage at the “fake” political leaders and all the lip service paid her cause when the cameras are rolling and Celebrity Greta is present.

She’s on board the racing sloop “Malizia II,” bombing across the Atlantic on a carbon-fibre/carbon-neutral sailboat trip to New York. The seas are heaving, but she’s as poker-faced as a Vegas high roller. It’s the tearful aftermath of a call home that reminds us that she’s just 16 when this footage was shot. She’s a teenager with Asperger’s forced to cope with being mobbed, meeting tens of thousands of strangers when what she craves are solitude, “routine,” and the family and the animals she always found easier to relate to.

“I Am Greta” isn’t just about a global phenomenon that’s grown out of one child’s protest. It’s about what a little girl, derided by climate change deniers and right wing pundits as “mentally ill” and “depressed” and “attention-starved,” having the do a staggering laundry list of things she fears the most in life because of one thing she fears worse than any other — mass extinction and an unending climate crisis that leads to it.

Nathan Grossman’s marvelous “fly on the wall” documentary follows Thunberg from that first day, as she took her hand-drawn placard and sat down in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm.

“SKOLSTREJK for KLIMATET,” it read. “School Strike for Climate.”

Adults shake their heads as they pass. One older woman stops to gently lecture her that yes, there’s a crisis, but you’d get more accomplished staying in school.

“No one gives a damn,” Greta mutters, in Swedish, with English subtitles.

And then other kids join her. A tiny bit of online video attention follows, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with millions of followers on Twitter, endorses her protest. Just like that, a Swedish protest becomes a European, and then global phenomenon and movement.

What humanizes her is how she soldiers through all this activity that she has an aversion to, accompanied by her skeptical father, polishing her message and sharpening her criticism, which she gets the chance to deliver in the world’s most public places — at conferences, in British parliament (“Is my microphone on?” she wants to know, in English. “Because you don’t seem to be hearing me.”) and at the U.N.

“I want you to panic. I want you to act like the house is on fire.”

Because, frankly, it is.

Grossman’s film makes us appreciate what a smart kid she is and how she somehow shrugs off her symptoms and the way she triggers the climate-denial right. Her Dad should have bought a plane ticket to Australia and punched the wingnut who called his daughter “a virtue signaling little turd” on Murdoch-friendly TV. But you know, flying is off limits in this family. That’s why she traveled to the UN via sailboat, after all.

Being on the autism spectrum may explain her laser-intense focus on this issue, on “drowning polar bears, deforestation and ocean acidification.” She freely admits it lets her “see through the static.”

Her Dad may be proud of her ability to turn herself into an expert on this subject and a global icon through her “almost photographic memory” (a politician fervently shoves a big climate report into her hands as she’s heading into one speech) and well-intentioned obsession. What moves her mother Elena to tears is just the knowledge that Greta is now able to “eat in front of other people,” another phobia related to her condition that she won’t let stop her.

Who knows if she’ll remain this focused on this issue forever? And will she remain an icon when she’s no longer a pony-tailed teen?

But when she promises “We will be a pain in the ass” of officialdom, and “We will not stop,” I wouldn’t bet against her. She’s already one tough, laser-focused broad.

MPA Rating: unrated, a little profanity

Cast: Greta Thunberg, Svante Thunberg, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emanuel Macron, Pope Francis

Credits: Directed by Nathan Grossman. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:37

As the lady once said, “What fresh Hell is this?”

For everybody who found the polish, sophistication and gentility of “The Devil’s Rejects” a turn-off, we present “Derelicts,” a little slice of holiday slaughter from the people who brought you…

Hell, I’ve never heard of any of them, and neither have you.

It’s a slasher/splatter pic about murderous drifters who dismember, shoot, skull-crush and sexually assault a seriously dysfunctional family gathering for an uneasy Thanksgiving dinner.

And as ol’ honest reviewer Abe put it, “People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

Constance (Kelly Dealyn) wakes up with a dream droplet of blood on her cheek. Testy husband Gregg (David Lee Hess) has no time for that. He’s prepping the meal for HER family. And her ob-gyn Dad (Steve Uzzell) and his new girlfriend (Lana Dieterich) woke everybody up early with their noisy love-making.

Gregg’s an out-of-work theater company director, their near-adult son Leslie (Dalton Allen) is a sex-obsessed cretin and daughter Barbara (Emily Ammon) is going through a mental health crisis that manifests itself with blackouts on the (running) track and nosebleeds.

Then this slaughterhouse gang of five led by “Cap” (Les Best) wipes out Constance’s brother and nephew, hijacks their truck and apparently follows the onboard GPS (only way to explain it) to their house.

Let the torture, murders and dress-for-dinner games begin.

“This is MY house!” the Cap lets one and all know. “I carved it outta the bones of 40 dead Chinamen in Cambodia, and I’m about to PAINT it in your blood!”

He’s got an “x” tattooed between his eyebrows, so any resemblance to Charles Manson is intentional.

The gang includes “Black Forrest” (Sam Pleasant), killer shrew Bo (Kara Mellyn) and most horrifically, “Turk” (Andre Evrenos) who never speaks. He only screams. Oh, and he’s fashioned a pink teddy bear into a mask.

The mayhem starts with another murder getting in the front door, then sexual assaults and escalates from there.

“FINGER food?”

Anyway, you get the idea. There’s nothing remotely witty about this, no real room for pathos or outrage either.

But as outraged Gregg is moved to ask, perhaps speaking to the potential audience of such movies — “Is that how you people get off?”

Don’t answer that.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual assault, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Les Best, Kelly Dealyn, Sam Pleasant, David Lee Hess, Steve Uzzell, Dalton Allen, Emily Ammon, Marcela Pineda and Andre Evrenos

Credits: Directed by Brett Glassberg, script by Andre Evrenos, Brett Glassberg and Clay Shirley. A Terror Films release.

Running time: 1:13

There’s no footage of Hurricane Maria’ pounding Puerto Rico back in 2017, back when the storm made landfall and wrecked the island.

We don’t see the gas lines, people lining up for water, the months of governmental indifference in San Juan and Washington.

No, there’ll be no paper-towel tossing here.

Cecilia Aldarondo’s “Landfall” is an impressive, impressionistic and intimate overview of the unhappy “Island of Enchantment” as it stands today, years after Hurricane Maria hit.

She ends her film with scenes of the street protests that brought down the island’s corrupt government in 12 days back in 2019. But everything that comes before is people reminiscing about the “tragedy” of Maria and “the real disaster (that) happened afterwards.” New Orleans level devastation, all levels of government services lost, decades of mismanagement, postponed infrastructure and incompetence all came home to roost.

People on the farms of Orocovis, in the beachfront tourist cities, on Vieques Island were cut off. “We didn’t know when help from the U.S.” was coming.

Those warehouses full of cases of bottled water that was never distributed? They’re shown here, and the natives are still furious about that.

Aldarondo, director of “Memories of a Penitent Heart,” travels the length and breadth of Puerto Rico, Bartolo to Dorado, San Juan to Rincón, sketching in lives interrupted but getting back to dinner-party-normal, fishermen back to harvesting spiny lobster, farmers hitching up oxen to the plow again.

But beyond all that, there is youthful discontent and island-wide fury at “The Junta,” the Obama-appointed fiscal management board trying to get the island’s debt under control.

In mid-crisis, outsiders are still looking for ways to cut costs and services.

Luxury real estate developers are cashing in, luring blockchain/crypto-currency hipsters into buying mansions. That’s a hustle that amounts to an entire chapter of “Landfall,” with Brock Pierce and other tycoons of digital currency trying to sell the island on becoming a haven for their online business and a tax shelter for their class of entrepreneurs.

Aldarondo captures a heated meeting with locals, with Pierce losing his temper but holding his own, in Spanish and English, with skeptical Puerto Ricans, who see this blockchain pitch as another short-term “gain,” like the island’s brief flirtation with industrialization in the ’50s and 60s.

Using old newsreels and tourism promotional films, she paints a portrait of past promise, and promises broken. If the Bitcoin billionaires get their way, will Puerto Rico progress into some status other than “territory/colony?” Not if that means taxes.

That’s one of the take-aways from “Landfall,” which will be on PBS’s “POV” series next year, but can be streamed during its Oscar qualifying run via DOC/NYC this week. As Puerto Ricans march, take over abandoned schools to house themselves in co-ops run like communes, and fight off complaints about “socialism,” none of the mostly-unnamed interview subjects makes any noise about “statehood.”

One member of the New York Puerto Rican diaspora complains about the city not being “my country.” Do they want independence? Will there blockchain mogul money behind such a push?

“Landfall” doesn’t really ask such questions, or answer them. Aldarondo was going for something more impressionistic and kaleidoscopic. But the documentary makes this much clear. The days of ignoring and neglecting Puerto Rico need to end. Puerto Ricans remind us that they deserve it, and that from now on, they insist on it.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity, smoking

Credits: Directed by Cecilia Aldarondo. An ITVS/POV release.

Running time: 1:34

Young woman wants to make it as a stand-up comic, stalks her geezer heckler, “a comedy urban legend” until he agrees to coach her.

We all know where “All Joking Aside” is going, basically by the time the opening credits end. But those credits, underscored with a collage of comic bits, have a point that I’ll come back to — this joke.

“NOBODY wants to be a stand-up. We all wanted to be actors. But crunches are HARD!”

So watching and listening to 20something Canadian actress Raylene Harewood struggle and “get better,” as the stand-up film formula ordains, one can be forgiven for getting stuck on that opening credits zinger delivered by a comic whose face we don’t see.

She’s lovely. She’s done the crunches. She gets more comfortable on the stage, the script’s “material” improves, and she’s still not funny.

So why would she want to play a comic?

This Canadian production doesn’t differ from any other movie about the struggle to be a stand-up, from “Punch Line” on down the line. So let’s pass along the best of the sage profundities served up by the “washed-up” alcoholic comic, ably played by veteran character actor Brian Markinson, who had the good sense to never do a “set.”

“Look girl, there are two types of people in this world — funny people and happy people. You cannot be both. Do yourself a favor and go try to be happy.”

“A comic is judged every twelve seconds of his life.”

And “Bob,” the legendary comic who never got a sitcom, who supposedly managed 1000 sets, all different, in one epic year on the road, opens “All Joking Aside” with the best single-sentence review the picture could hope for.

“I’ve seen this movie a dozen times, sweetheart.”

Harewood’s a good actress, and gives a little weight to the “problems” Charlie, her character, deals with, that “personal s—” she’s supposed to “work out on the stage.”

But she’s not funny. Her delivery is all rounded locutions, prissy posh Kerry Washingtonish, not exaggerated enough to be Drew Barrymore funny.

Not that we’d see either of them as stand-ups. Because they’ve done the crunches.

“All Joking Aside” isn’t awful and Harewood isn’t its lone shortcoming. The script is too thin to hold our interest. Stand-up is so over-covered as film subject matter that the only way it can work in a movie these days is as backdrop for a more interesting story in the foreground.

Jenny Slate’s “Obvious Child” comes to mind. She’s funny, a convincing stand-up, but that’s not what has to carry the movie.

Not saying that this movie needed an unwanted pregnancy story, with stand-up as its subtext. But all joking aside, that would’ve been funnier.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking.

Cast: Raylene Harewood, Brian Markinson, Dave “Squatch” Ward, Katrina Reynolds

Credits: Directed by Shannon Kohli, script by James Pickering. A Quiver release.

Running time: 1:23

He was a modest, pious farm boy sent into the slaughterhouse of trench warfare in World War I.

When his moment came, he covered a withdrawal of Allied forces by single-handedly staying behind and mowing down the Germans with a succession of Lewis (machine) guns.

He didn’t sing his own praises, but as others recognized what he did and called attention to it, he became his country’s most famous infantryman of The Great War. They even named his hometown after him.

Seen through American eyes, Aníbal Milhais is Portugal’s Sergeant York, brave, a crack shot whose grit stood out among the faceless masses of the trenches, a symbol of sacrifice and a “Hero on the Front.”

Milhais earns a generic combat bio-pic from co-directors Gonçalo Galvão Teles and Jorge Paixão da Costa, nothing that will make anyone forget the superb action, suspense and artistic aims of “1917,” but technically and aesthetically serviceable and well-acted.

The script follows Milhais into the trenches as a young man (João Arrais) and back home, raising his daughter years later as an older father (Miguel Borges), someone not impressed enough by the ceremony where they rename his village for him to show up on time, distracted by farm problems, including the wolf that’s killing his sheep.

The illiterate young man copes with the deadly tedium in the trenches, the snipers that thin their ranks, the whistles that officers blow to send them “over the top”) and strain that sends comrades off their rocker.

A kind doctor convinces him to write to his (also illiterate) beloved (Filipa Louciero) back in Valongo.

Back home, older, wiser and decorated, he hasn’t let go of the cynicism that pervaded the ranks of Portugal’s 75,000 man expeditionary force.

“The soldier is an ornament for politicians to parade,” he tells his little girl (Carminho Coelho), in Portuguese with English subtitles.

As the combat service proceeds to Aníbal’s moment of truth, we follow the older father as his daughter trails him into the foothills and forest, in search of a sheep-killing wolf.

That’s a nice parallel in Mário Botequilha and Jorge Paixão da Costa’s script, a little heavy on the war/wolf allegory, but it works. And the striking settings of Aníbal’s north Portugal home can be both pretty and primal. This is where life and death has always been on the line.

The combat sequences are good, if nothing we haven’t seen before and staged and shot more impressively in films from Europe, America, Australia and Turkey.

That goes for “Hero on the Front (titled “Soldado Milhões” in Portugal) as well. Political unrest in Lisbon is the background for the expeditionary force’s departure and is unexplained. The strain on the soldiers didn’t have a name until World War I, and is thinly developed.

But it’s still an interesting story of a farm lad who did his duty, survived the slaughter and didn’t think much of the people who sent him there or their honors and decorations.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: João Arrais, Miguel Borges, Raimundo Cosme, Carminho Coelho and Ivo Canelas

Credits: Directed by Gonçalo Galvão Teles, Jorge Paixão da Costa, script by Mário Botequilha, Jorge Paixão da Costa. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:29

The totality of human existence might be summed up in the forlorn, inquisitive and sometimes playful narrations of the great German filmmaker, that keen-eyed observer of humanity Werner Herzog.

For his latest, the filmmaker who gave us “My Best Fiend” (about working with madman/actor Klaus Kinski), “Grizzly Man” and “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” travels the world with a Cambridge planetary scientist in search of meteorites, their impact on life on Earth — perhaps even as the source of life on Earth — and on human history.

In “Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds,” Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer visit meteor craters in Australia, India and the Yucatan, travel to Mecca (via pilgrims’ cell phone video of touching the pre-Islamic sacred meteorite, “The Black Rock”) to Antarctica with scientists look for fresh meteors and to Norway where a jazz musician and amateur meteor hunter finds micrometeorites. They visit the quirky French Alsatian town of Ensisheim, where a 1492 meteor strike became famous for altering European history and is commemorated to this day.

His co-filmmaker, scientist Clive Oppenheimer, questions the legions of astronomers, meteor specialists and Planetary Defense (“killer” meteorite hunters) and natives in the Outback.

Herzog captures faces, and the spectacle of Mecca and the skull makeup word by participants of a Day of the Dead festival in Merida, Mexico, the exultation of scientists finding a fresh meteorite on the snow of a high plateau near the South Pole.

And Herzog narrates, comments on scientists who might be able to go on and on on their subject, “never boringly,” breaking off a digression into an “impossible form of matter” (quasi crystals) found in meteors with “Yes, it gets so complicated now that we’re not going to torture you with details.”

Then, there’s Paul Steinhart, once dragged to Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in search of the early 20th century extraterrestrial explosion that leveled forests, even though his “outdoor experience did not extend beyond the lawns of Princeton.”

Herzog sets the travelogue scene in far away places like the shoreline of the Yucatan peninsula in the center of where the “dinosaur killer” asteroid struck eons ago.

“Chicxulub Puerto is a beach resort so godforsaken you want to cry…only leaden boredom weighs upon everything.”

That’s our Werner.

The narration tries a bit too hard this time out. It’s almost his sole presence in “Fireball,” so much so that you fret “He’s gotten too old to be making these journeys into the mystic himself” any more. But no. A single off-camera question lets us know he’s back on Antarctica, where he filmed “Encounters at the End of the World.”

But he’s still the most curious, empathetic and fascinating filmmaker the screen has produced. And if his curiosity is cave paintings from the Dawn of Man, the last days of the Grizzly Man, or our relationship to fireballs from the sky, we’re blessed to have him inviting us along as his traveling, investigating companion.

Cast: Narrated by Werner Herzog, with Clive Oppenheimer, Kelly Fast, Meenakshi Wadhwa, Jan Braly Kihle, Jon Larsen, Simon Schaffer and Paul Steinhart.

Credits: Directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer, script by Werner Herzog. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:37

There’s no one “Eureka!” moment when “Echo Boomers,” a fictionalized “political statement” burglary version of “The Bling Ring,” goes wrong.

It’s a solid enough heist picture, with the hook that the thieves are all aggrieved millennials lashing out at a “fixed” economy by stealing from the rich, and trashing their mansions as they do. But as it marches down a well-worn path to a conclusion we see coming well in advance, investment in the characters flags and interest in their fates vanishes, like all the cash these 20somethings are “earning” and burning through.

Patrick Schwarzenegger is the lead, and is adequate in the role of “the conscience” of this gang. Until he starts voice-over narrating their story. The framing device is interviews being conducted by an author (Lesley Anne Warren) who talks to Lance (Schwarzenegger) and others in prison. Schwarzenegger reads the voice-over as if he’s woodenly reciting lines he’s never rehearsed.

Lance comes to Chicago after college with $60,000 in student loans and little prospect of ever paying them back thanks to his degree in art. His cousin Jack (Gilles Geary) promises to hook him up with his “start up.” Jack picks him up in a Porsche Cayenne, so “the good life” beckons, right?

Lance meets Jack’s associates and half-notices the stick-on sign peeling off the panel truck they need for their work. No worries, Lance. You’ll be working with art, “in acquisitions.”

His first clue that they’re thieves is when he’s handed a skeletal mask, they pile out of the truck and break into a suburban mansion.

He is slack jawed at the destruction he witnesses. Ally (Haley Law), Chandler (Reggie Law), Stewart (Oliver Cooper) and the rest don’t just steal — they shatter, rip, spray paint and utterly trash these monuments to affluence, “destroying someone else’s life” in a vendetta against the one percent.

It isn’t until after the smash-and-grab-and-smash that he gets the sales pitch for “joining.” That’s ridiculous, but then again, they’ve already made him an accomplice.

“Don’t you feel cheated?” leader Ellis (Alex Pettyfer) asks. All this playing by the rules — good college, good grades — got them all nothing but debt. “We’re not just stealing. We’re sending a MESSAGE!”

Michael Shannon is properly menacing as the fence who gives them addresses (provided by Big Insurance) and underpays and threatens them when they screw up.

Considering how they party and snort away their profits, time and again, there’s a lot of screwing-up going on.

Lance narrates this story, passing along the “rules” to this enterprise — “When the system’s corrupt, why play by their rules?” is one. “If they won’t let us dream, we won’t let them sleep” is another.

What director Seth Savoy’s film (he’s also one of three credited screenwriters) is aiming for is a sort of “Point Break” sympathy for the gang of “misfits,” and “Boomer” never comes close to achieving that.

There are montages capturing the way cable news labels and shames millennials and recreating the awful economic prospects that generation faces when it enters the workforce. But then Ally drags Lance along for drinks with her college buddies, who have Peace Corps work behind them, professional success and budding families. Yes, they probably had advantages. But they’re millennials and they’re making it.

And then there’s the business of hiring a middling actor with a famous surname to star in your movie about have-nots who never had a shot stealing from the super rich to “get even.” There’s a disconnect there.

“Mixed messaging” drags on the script, basically from start to finish. The idealism espoused loses its bite when you’re sticking it up your nose.

The heists skip over the details — “grace notes” — that would showcase why they need Lance in their gang. He knows real art and what has value. Why not have him explain this vase, that painting or sculpture? Was the leading man not up to it?

And the prison interview framing device takes more of the mystery away than it should.

There are good players surrounding Schwarzenegger, so at least he’s taken that old Hollywood actor’s adage to heart — “Always try to work with Michael Shannon.”

But “Echo Boomers” — terrible title, BTW — can’t get by on echoes of better thrillers that covered the same ground. And betting on Schwarzenegger making the family name an acting dynasty seems like a long shot, even in a business known for its nepotism.

MPA Rating: R for drug use and pervasive language

Cast: Patrick Schwarzenegger, Alex Pettyfer, Haley Law, Lesley Anne Warren and Michael Shannon.

Credits: Directed by Seth Savoy, script by Kevin Bernhardt, Jason Miller and Seth Savoy. A Saban release.

Running time: 1:34

A chilling political murder in broad daylight in an allegedly free country, “the perfect crime.”

This comes out Dec. 11.

If there’s one thing any film fan should take away from “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on ‘The Exorcist,'” it’s exactly the same thing you should take away from “Friedkin Uncut,” the earlier doc about the quintessential hotshot Hollywood director of the ’70s.

The man can tell a story. And how. William Friedkin weaves anecdotes about “Exorcist” stars Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller and folds in stories about the great composers Bernard Hermann and Lalo Schifrin, both of whom he rejected when it came to scoring the film.

“I wanted a piece of music” he says, that felt “like a cold hand on the back of the neck.”

“Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield would do.

He rejects the notion that he was “foreshadowing ANYthing” in the iconic demonic possession thriller. Friedkin talks about “serendipity,” and “instinctive” choices, quotes the great Fritz Lang about how relying on those “accidents” and coincidences and gut feelings is “a kind of sleepwalking security” for filmmakers like Lang (whom he interviewed for a doc in the ’70s) and himself.

He recalls using an on set gun shot to get the right shocked/startled reactions from his actors.

He tells of visiting a zen garden in Kyoto when premiering the film in Japan, wondering “What the hell’s THIS about?” and then weeping at the rocks in a sea of “raked sand.”

And he declares that “It looks like, in retrospect, that I knew what I was doing.”

He did. A notoriously “volatile” figure on film sets, he’s aged into a movie making/film history/art history raconteur of the First Order, a Peter Bogdanovich, Oliver Stone or Orson Welles lite.

Friedkin sits down with filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe to break down, deconstruct and remember “The Exorcist,” revealing his “subliminal” tricks with sound and one-to-five frame glimpses of ghostly images inserted, the people he hired or wanted to hire, from the aforementioned composers to actor Stacy Keach (who would’ve been GREAT as the younger priest) and the “influences” he recognizes, from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” to Dreyer’s “Ordet.”

But Renais (“Last Year in Marienbad,” “Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and Welles (“Citizen Kane”) were on his mind, too.

He praises the cameraman Ricky Bravo, who “followed Castro through the jungles and into Havana” as a documentary/news photographer, and who roamed Friedkin’s sets, shooting hand-held to give movies like “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist” immediacy and energy.

And he talks about art and artists, from Vermeer, Rembrandt and Pollack to James Ensor, Magritte and Caravaggio, with a nod to the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, all of whom impacted how he framed shots and lit human faces.

He takes credit for restoring the Iraq prologue to “The Exorcist,” bringing his camera and star Max Von Sydow to an actual archeological dig in Al Hadhar, a sequence so beautiful Spielberg repeated it for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The guy is urbane, cosmopolitan and artistically sophisticated, and while there is no peer to Orson Welles as director/raconteur, Friedkin is no slouch and a fascinating character to listen to.

No, he’s not an unimpeachable narrator in telling his own story. He gives himself the credit for taking on William Peter Blatty’s novel (Blatty chose Friedkin, not the other way around). And his Bernard Hermann story is funny, but makes him come off smarter and funnier.

Hermann’s story is Hollywood legend, and probably the true version of how the great Welles and Hitchcock collaborator snarked himself out of scoring “The Exorcist.”

And Friedkin’s ready supply of references and recollections is so impressive as to make one wonder how much of this is scripted, polished and rehearsed. Is anybody this witty off-the-cuff?

But that takes nothing away from this Friedkin appreciation, essay and “How I made that movie” documentary. He’s a genuine character, and his stories make it plain why he’s a favorite “An Evening With” guest of film festivals. On celluloid or in person, Billy Friedkin’s still a great storyteller.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic horror violence, profanity

Cast: William Friedkin

Credits: Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:44