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It plays like a fable, but the bulk of this bizarre story of World War II, Nazi art thefts and those who helped with the stealing is true.

You can’t make this stuff up. Or in this case, you don’t need to.

Stuntman and producer Dan Friedkin, making his feature directing debut, renders this case of Han van Meergeren and Vermeer in broad strokes (sorry), struggling to turn what could have been a dark (or darkly comic) fable into a “ticking clock” thriller.

But the generally straightforward approach serves his cast well, and provides a rare tour de force for Guy Pearce, who is always good, especially when he has a role that requires a certain flamboyance.

Pearce is van Meegeren, an artist, art lover, art dealer and slippery swell laying low in his native Netherlands as if he’s expecting a shoe to drop.

Claes Bang (“The Square”) is a “Dutch Jew in a Canadian uniform,” a former tailor and jazz fan turned resistance fighter, now a Canadian officer trying to track down Nazi collaborators.

One of the key points of stress in this multi-handed script is that between those who “fled” Holland, to Britain, plotting a return to power after liberation, those who stayed behind and fought, as Joseph Piller (Bang) did, and those who “did what we had to” in order to survive, like Piller’s wife (Marie Bach Henson). She kept the company of German soldiers.

So did van Meegeren. Apparently. What Piller wants to find out is if this insanely valuable painting by “The Master of Delft,” Jan (Johannes) Vermeer van Delft, which wound up in the collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, was stolen, and from whom.

As Piller is Jewish, those noting his passion for the case figure the fact that the artwork was stolen “from Jews” further motivates him. As the people jumping to this conclusion are non-Jewish, and under suspicion for collaboration with the Anti-Semitic enemy, you can see why he’d get his back up.

But his prisoner is a mixture of unctuous charm and white-haired menace. And even though the State Police are hunting for him as well, he’s not cooperating.

“I find that in life, as in art, it’s always best not to spoil the surprise.”

We sense we’re being set up for a game of cat and mouse, and we’re not wrong. When van Meegeren wonders about his own “redemption,” and perhaps the captain’s secret need for it as well, we wonder if that’s a parallel the script will play up. Not really.

Piller interrogates van Meegeren and those who knew him, with an old Resistance friend (Roland Møller) there to provide muscle and menace. A cocked pistol is quite the incentive. Eventually, they have to hide their prisoner from government officials who’d love for van Meergeren to carry his secrets to his grave.

And that’s when he starts bargaining — an internment with good light, canvas and oils, access to “my assistant,” who is also his lover and model (Olivia Grant).

Through monologues and flashbacks, the painter and art lover tells his story. Meanwhile, events outside are conspiring to bring this all to a head and this “traitor” to trial.

Public firing squads are a common sight. So yes, the stakes are high. What will be van Meergeren’s defense?

The period detail and immersion in the art of the Dutch Masters creates the color palette of “The Last Vermeer,” and sets its tone.

And all of it — the strife in Piller’s marriage, the government intrigues, literally chasing van Meergeren at one point — is but the canvas for Pearce to paint his portrait of the duality of man, the shared guilt of those who seemed to thrive under Nazi Occupation, a guilt van Meergeren seems to not understand.

Pearce makes him ramrod-straight in posture and ever-the-epicurean about his tastes in art, and people and whisky. We can believe he dealt with the Nazis, and we can believe he figured he could outsmart them as we wonder if he’s outsmarting Piller, or even himself. Even with a firing squad at stake, Pearce’s van Meergeren is slow to panic, reluctant to lower himself to ask for help.

What an interesting pigeon-hole Bang has um, painted himself into. He’s now made three films set in the world of art –“The Square,” “The Burnt Orange Heresy” and “The Last Vermeer.” Something about him says “at home in the world of art and its pretenses.” Perhaps he should have a word with his agent.

The cat-and-mouse stuff, the “discoveries,” aren’t the hardest plot points to detect, nor are the under-developed distractions Piller has thrown in front of him.

But the courtroom finale, eating up much of the third act, is a corker. And Pearce holds our focus, still or animated, chewing up a scene or so underplaying it he’s still the center of attention.

Like the Great Master he is, he knows how to grab the eye and hold its focus, with or without a menacing mustache.

MPAA Rating: R for some language, violence and nudity

Cast: Claes Bang, Olivia Grant, Vicky Krieps, Marie Bach Henson, Roland Møller and Guy Pearce

Credits: Directed by Dan Friedkin, script by Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, James McGee, based on the book by Jonathan Lopez. A Sony TriStar release.

running time: 1:53

Writer-director Justin Simien has more experience in satire (“Dear White People”) than horror, and a better handle on lighthearted lectures than laughs.

Which is to say, so what if this supernatural satire “Bad Hair” is more about the message of the monster than the monster itself? It works.

And that monster? African American women’s hair, that one bit of “Black Girl Magic” that requires…assistance. Simien serves up genuine torture porn about what women with naturally kinky hair, “as nature intended, go through to Be Like Beyonce’.

Anna Bludso (Zaria Kelly) learned this lesson in childhood, that “relaxer” accident administered by her step-sister. She wears the scars of it into adulthood as she (Elle Lorraine of “Insecure”) struggles to fit in at Culture, a Black MTV facing major changes in Music Television in 1989.

All Anna wanted to be was on-air talent. But it was the hunky receptionist (Jay Pharaoh), the guy she sleeps with on the sly, who got that gig.

But her tinted-glass ceiling may be about to shatter. The pre-“woke” Woke workplace that Black Pride Preacher Edna (Judith Scott) presided over has a new corporate boss Grant (James Van Der Beek) and a new EVP of programming, former-model and “influencer” before that was a thing, Zora (Vanessa Williams, perfection).

Out goes Edna, and Zora — as intimidating and probably conniving as she is — hears out Anna’s pitch for a show that sounds exactly like “Total Request Live,” before that was a thing. They’ll go all-in on “hip hop and this new jack s—.” This makeover could fulfill bossman Grant’s vision.

“If this succeeds, it could change popular culture!”

Anna, behind on her rent and more bubbly than sexy or confident on camera, has one thing holding her back — her hair.

“Sisters get fired for less than that every day,” Zora purrs. To be “one of MY girls,” she’s got to “flow.” More precisely, her hair does.

The “creamy crack” (hair relaxer) won’t cut it. She needs to go for broke (literally) and go all-in on this new thing — “the weave.” And no weaver but Virgie (Laverne Cox of “Orange is the New Black”) will do.

The scariest scene in this “horror comedy” is the (slightly) exaggerated torture of picking “her,” how Virgie describes the hair that will be the New Anna, and weaving it in.

“My sources are exclusive.”

And her methods? “Essential oils” and curved needles more commonly used for surgical stitches? Exquisitely painful.

Simien sets up Anna’s new path as a contrast to the foster family of African American folklore professors (Blair Underwood. Michelle Hurd) who raised her. She may see eerie similarities between her story and a folk horror tale about “The Moss-Haired Girl.” Anna may wonder about what Zora’s weave, and that of a pop star (Kelly Rowland) who has extended her Janet Jacksonish music video career with her weave, have cost them.

But she will not know the “full” story until she’s gotten hers.

There’s just a hint of the delicious bitchiness of this office culture that Simien captures, and perhaps could have brought in a female co-writer to fluff up. The women are all “sister to sister” until the urge to backbite overwhelms them.

Williams, reviving her “Ugly Betty” edge, plays a character who’s a comment on her persona and her screen career. Fair-skinned and “beautiful” by “European” standards, Zora doesn’t sound like any of the music-savvy African Americans who are now her minions.

Zora’s attempt to leap into an argument with an enraged Social Justice Warrior Princess may be the funniest line Williams ever said. And it’s only a single two-letter “word” that Ms. Elocution and Poise plays as if it’s her first-time ever saying it out loud.

“Yo yo yo.”

Sister please.

Simien’s film has a cluttered feel, and in trying to steer clear of archetypes, he robs us of the satisfaction of a clearly-defined villain mentor vs. the more high-minded one. Zora may take credit for ideas and covet the spotlight Anna craves for herself, but she’s doing what the righteous but imperiously snobby Edna never would — hear Anna out, give her a chance to rise.

The “hair” with a murderous mind of its own is more funny than scary.

“Bad Hair” and its follicles are on their firmest ground just poking at the prejudice, pressure and unnatural (but admittedly lovely) beauty that women feel compelled to pursue to get noticed, get ahead and get theirs. The supernatural element feels unnecessary, save for the finale.

Still, hair that promises to deliver super powers, but that comes with supernatural trade-offs? That’s a killer concept and a satire that almost writes itself.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sex, profanity, smoking

Cast: Elle Lorraine, Laverne Cox, Jay Pharaoh, Yaani King Mondschein, Usher Raymond, Blair Underwood and Vanessa Williams

Credits: Written and directed by Justin Simien. A Hulu release.

Running time: 1:42

John Brown’s Kennedy Farm HQ outside of Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. #moviesinspiretravel

It’s about 8 miles from the town, and a tiny place that Brown, played by Ethan Hawke in the wonderful “The Good Lord Bird,” packed himself and 21 other men, along with two Brown daughters, in prep for his assault on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.

There’s a set of the jaw, a mercenary narrowing of the eyes in Anya Taylor-Joy that hisses “relentless.” It’s reminiscent of Natalie Dormer’s ravenous gaze, although less sexual.

She can soften it a little, as she did in “Emma.” But it’s always there, in “Thoroughbreds” or “Peaky Blinders” and it’s what makes the limited series “The Queen’s Gambit” seem tailor-made (sorry) for her.

In this adaptation of the late Walter Tevis’s novel (his “The Hustler” and “The Man Who Fell to Earth” were also made into films), she’s a chess prodigy, an “intuitive” champion utterly myopic about the world she lives in and the life she’s eschewing to keep her eyes on the prize, and the board.

Family may fail her — her mad mathematician mother (Chloe Pirrie) may have even expected to end Beth’s life the day her childhood ended, when her mother died in a Kentucky car crash that Beth survived. And the couple that eventually adopts her (Marielle Heller and Patrick Kennedy) don’t support her passion, and can’t even stay together for her sake.

Her one friend childhood friend at the orphanage (Moses Ingram) might let her down. And the chess players she runs into, afoul of and tumbles into bed with will never be up to snuff.

Beth Harmon won’t let any of them stand in her way, and Taylor-Joy lets us see the unworldly, naive but heartless Beth calculate the costs-to-benefits transaction that every relationship in her life represents. She’s even relentless in her vices, the ones that either aid her rise, or point to its obvious pitfalls — booze, pills.

Scott Frank’s series takes us from young Beth (Isla Johnson) picking up the game from the custodian (Bill Camp) at Methuen Hall, and picking up a lifelong tranquilizer habit from a facility that in the ’50s and ’60s drugged the kids in its charge.

The older Beth remembers falling in love with “the board, all the world in just 64 squares.” Alone in the world, with chess “I feel safe. I can control it. I can dominate it.”

She isn’t self-aware enough to understand the instability that comes with the brain one has to have to conquer this game. Her mathematically-published mother should be at least a cautionary lesson for her — in literary (and dramatic) cliche terms. But no.

Her inexorable march into and through the man’s world of 1960s chess takes up much of “The Queen’s Gambit.” Win after win, men (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Harry Melling, others) taking her lightly because she’s learned the game without knowing about “ratings,” rankings and tournament etiquette and protocols.

Movies on the subject have covered covered the mind-crushing mania that this ancient and inscrutable game generates (again, cliched) — “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” “Pawn Sacrifice”). “Gambit” goes deeper into the chess, especially when Beth finds a foe worthy of her talent (Thomas Brodie-Sangster of the “Maze Runner” movies).

But that “relentless” march quality means the series telegraphs its chapters, even as it bogs down in the late ’60s, tourneys, “Russians,” crises of confidence and every predictable drink-Ripple-from-the-bottle pitfall along the way. That makes it drag, not always, but more than you’d like.

There’s just a little humor, much of it of the female empowerment variety. And creator-director )and writer of two episodes) Frank, a wonderful screenwriter (“Out of Sight,” “Logan,””The Lookout”) allows the odd perfectly-composed shot to call attention to itself.

Some of the co-stars (Camp) seem shortchanged, while Heller, an actress, writer and director (“Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) and Brodie-Sangster at least get to make enriching impressions and contributions.

But this is Taylor-Joy’s quest and march, and we see Beth’s monomania mature her as an actress over seven episodes. She marches into the frame, lets us see the girl acquiring a poker-face and developing killer instinct and gamesmanship.

And she sashays out of the frame, dancing by herself (’60s pop) with regret never furrowing her brow, even in that rare moment when she figures out what “longing” feels like. First scene to last, she makes this a character with her nose to the ground as she sniffs out weakness and vulnerabilities, in all the men she faces off with, and in herself.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, sex, alcohol and drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Bill Camp, Marielle Heller, Moses Ingram, Thomas Brodie-Sangster

Credits: Created and directed by Scott Frank, based on a novel by Walter Tevis. A Netflix release.

Running time: Seven episodes @ 49-59 minutes each

Here’s a no-budget Canadian thriller that comes oh-so-close to being the “Little Horror Engine that Could.”

“Halloween Party” almost gets by on just-enough character development, a workable plot — if they’d stick with it — and Classic Canadian Comic Banter.

It “almost” makes you forget how long before writer-director Jay Dahl (“Boyclops” and “There are Monsters” were his) makes us wait before even trying to scare us.

We have to forgive the generally blase means of killing off coeds and frat bros. We must shrug off that the killings are off camera.

And let’s not mention how it starts promisingly, picks up steam, and then sort of stumbles to a halt for a long stretch leading into the final act.

Coeds Grace (Amy Groening, yes related to Matt) and Zoe (Marietta Laan) are chatting away, looking at Zoe’s vacation photos, when a virus pops up on Zoe’s computer.

“Hello, Grace,” it says, in graphics anyone who sees it will say, “Hey, that looks like Nintendo!”

Before she can blurt out “How’d it know my name?” the “meme” has asked her to type in “Your greatest fear.” And she’d better do it in like 40 seconds. Or ELSE.

“Your greatest fear will come true!”

Grace beats the clock, but when the viral virus demands the same of Zoe, she’s slow on the uptake. An ’80s computer generated witch accompanies the words “Your worst fear is coming to get you!”

As Zoe’s fear was “pig people,” and every “greatest fear” in the movie has a back story, we have an idea of what’s coming.

Grace? As long as she types in “vagina spiders” quick enough, her doom can be postponed.

The cops (unseen) don’t buy this, so Grace does what heroines always do in horror movies. She visits Nerd Central. That’s where Spencer (T. Thomason), long-nicknamed “Special” as in “special needs,” begins their deconstruction of what they’re dealing with.

These early scenes of electronic sleuthing, investigating and reasoning out the supernatural thing they’re up against are the film’s best. That’s partly because of the snappy and snippy exchanges between them, and between the campus “bros” who tolerate but look down on “Special.”

“This where the roofies party’s at?” “Yo, broheem, looking SEXUAL.”

Their investigations take them to the library, where there are clues on film. NOT on a DVD, or even a VHS, either. Got to check out a projector and a screen as well.

“How did folks WATCH stuff in ‘The Old Days?'” “Seriously, people were just ANIMALS before Netflix.”

If this snark had continued all the way through “Halloween Party,” if the cute nursing student/nerd “relationship” had played around a lot more with the “Will they f—?” 1980s movie formula that Spencer tactlessly lays out of out-of-his-league Grace, “Halloween Party” could have been the horror sleeper of the season.

Even the unwieldy story and cheesy effects could have been assets, not liabilities.

As it is, this “Party” comes ever so close for ever so short a period of time, and then rims out.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gory horror violence, profanity

Cast: Amy Groening, T. Thomason, Marietta Laan, Shelley Thompson, Scott Bailey and Zach Faye.

Credits: Written and directed by Jay Dahl. A Red Hound release.

Running time: 1:35

East meets West in the lightly charming children’s lunar fantasy “Over the Moon,” a Chinese-made Netflix movie that puts a modern Hollywood spin on a Chinese folk legend.

The animation, from “Kung Fu Panda” veterans Pearl Studios of Shanghai, is first rate, the songs pleasant if not particularly memorable.

The story? It’s a real “kitchen sink” affair, a “Mulan,” “Maleficent” and “Tron” mashup stuffed with science and silliness and oh-so-many-cute-sidekicks.

Is there a McDonald’s toy tie-in with this release in China, as of this month the world’s number one movie market?

Little Fei Fei grew up with her eyes on the skies, hearing her mother’s version of the story of Chang’e, the Goddess of the Moon, and Hou yi the archer. Theirs was a great love, but there were immortality pills and they were separated and Chang’e is doomed to spend eternity on the Moon.

“When she cries, her tears turn to stardust.”

Oh, and a giant space dog (a chow, of naturally) takes bites out of the moon each month, which accounts for the phases.

Years pass, songs come and go, and Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) becomes a motherless teen, running the Yanshi City bake shop with her dad (John Cho).

But this new woman in Dad’s life (Sandra Oh) triggers Fei Fei’s jealousy and memories of “the perfect family” that they were. As they make preparations — and moon cakes — for the annual Moon Festival, Science Girl plots and plans to build a rocket to take her to the moon.

She will prove Chang’e is real, that Mom’s stories were true, and revive her father’s memories of Mom, banishing Mrs. Zhong (Oh) forever.

The first sidekick is Bungee, Fei Fei’s pet rabbit. The first flashes of comedy come from Mrs. Zhong’s “rambunctious” son, tweener Chin (Robert G. Chiu). He’s convinced he has a super power. He can run through anything — walls, etc.

“No BARRIERS!” is his catchphrase.

When Fei Fei makes her lunar attempt, naturally “annoying” Chin stows away. The rocket has promise, but a teenager’s limitations in terms of planning. Luckily, there’s a little magical intervention from the Goddess herself.

But about that Goddess (Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton”). She’s not what Mom described. She’s hardly “alone,” and not doing much crying. She’s a pop diva, with an audience of loyal “fans,” sort of a Chinese Katy Perry or Rihanna in space, or Zeng Keni singing in English. Not a shrinking violet, in other words.

“I’m the light every night in your world,” she sings. Worship me.

Fei Fei meets her, and Chang’e has just two questions. “Where’s my gift?” And “What butcher cut your hair?”

Chinese Mean Girls are the meanest.

Fei Fei’s quest changes and that “proof” and “bring back our perfect family” priority tumbles away as she encounters “Biker Chicks” on Tron-cycles (literally giant “chicks), and a blobbish former “court jester” banned from court for being a motor-mouthed nervous talker who sounds like Ken Jeong.

Co-director Glen Keane is one of the major animators/designers of Disney’s recent classics — the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” “Pocahontas,” etc. Every character in this is well-conceived, visually. There’s even a “Kung Fu Panda” styled sketched and water-colored fantasy sequence, relating the story of Chang’e and Hou yi.

But “Over the Moon” is all over the place in terms of themes, plot and such. The film is much more interesting and fun on Terra Firma, capturing the routine of baking moon cakes, the banter of big family dinners celebrating the Moon Festival (listen for Margaret Cho and Kimiko Glenn there), maglev trains and the wonders of childhood.

The script allows for one emotional moment and just a couple of real laughs, as well as a few chuckles.

It’s not quite up there with Netflix’s lovely holiday offering from last year, “Klaus,” even if it is several steps above the studio’s animated “miss” “The Willoughbys.”

But it’s a pleasant kid-friendly diversion on a par with Pearl’s “Abominable,” and in a year when animated films aren’t heading to theaters or coming out at all, it might even be an Oscar contender.

MPAA Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Cathy Ang, Phillipa Soo, Ken Jeong, Sandra Oh, Margaret Cho and John Cho.

Credits: Directed by Glen Keane and John Kahrs, script by Audrey Wells and Jennifer Yee McDevitt. A Pearl Studios film, a Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” has been on a lot of people’s minds of late. Lucky, affluent people gathered for a masked ball, sickening and dying? Yes, it sounds like all manner of conservative “Super Spreader” events.

The Norwegian writer-director Jarand Herdal takes that basic premise and puts it in a post-apocalyptic setting with “Cadaver (Kadaver),” a thriller about guests invited to the last hotel for dinner and a show.

As even a passing knowledge of Poe, the briefest acquaintance with horror or the damned obvious title gives away where this is going, the pleasure in this thriller comes from tone, tricks, committed actors and execution. The writer-director, making his feature film debut, ensures that those come off with style.

Some sort of nuclear event — the old newspapers blowing down the ruined streets in perpetual gloom or rain aren’t clear — has brought on End Times. Accident during heightened tensions, or attack, it doesn’t matter. Bodies are everywhere as people die of starvation some months after the disaster.

Actress Leonara (Gitte Witt) and husband Jacob (Thomas Gullestad) navigate this world of doom, where every closed door opens onto a fresh horror — a suicide, a desiccated corpse — with their ten year-old daughter Alice (Tuva Olivia Remman).

The adults take turns bucking each other up (in Norwegian, with English subtitles).

“We have nothing left.” “We have to hang in there. We have each other. We have Alice.”

In an every person for himself world, peril is everywhere, especially in the dark. Despair rules the daylight.

And then, a break, a lifeline. A barker advertises “dinner and a show” at The Hotel. Dress up, regain your humanity, if just for a night. How do they have food? How could there still be a staff? Don’t look a gift theatrical horse in the mouth.

But…your daughter. “This show isn’t for children.” Please, she’s an actress’s daughter. Look at the horror around you. What could shock or scar her now?

Mathias (Thorbjørn Harr) is the maître d’ and MC for the evening and their “first time guests.”

“Forget the world outside,” he urges. Eat, drink, enjoy, escape.

He presides over a vast wait staff and busy kitchen. And the show? You’re a part of it, everyone and everything you see will be “theater.”

It’ll be like “Tony & Tina’s Wedding,” with bickering and sex and oh, a little murderous violence.

See what I mean about “We know where this is going?”

Of course, Alice-the-wandering-child is separated from the parents. They’re hurled into a frantic search, “mid show,” for their child, through scores of rooms, kitchens, convincing themselves “It’s not real” right up to the point they know it is.

“Cadaver” relies too much on tropes and coincidences. But it succeeds or fails on the back of the performances, and they’re quite good. Witt in particular gets across a smart, dogged woman of the theater who isn’t falling for this or that and isn’t leaving without her daughter.

Harr gets across a sort of End Times louche. life, love, hope, the essentials of humanity, are but abstract concepts now. Doom does that to a guy. And when that takes hold, you don’t fear death, but you lose any sense of morality and humanity.

“Cadaver” is gorgeous to look at — the ruined city reminded me of that classic British post-nuclear thriller “Threads” — and well-played, but predictable enough to amount to a mixed bag of a thriller. Still, at under 90 minutes, it gets to its point and makes its impressions in a near rush, and wastes none of the viewer’s time doing it.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, sex

Cast: Gitte Witt, Thomas Gullestad, Thorbjørn Harr, Tuva Olivia Remman, Trine Wiggen

Credits: Written and directed by Jarand Herdal. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:27

Somewhere early on in Bruce Springsteen’s latest “gather musicians in my barn to cut a record” documentary, “Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You,” the big question he invites us to ask of him becomes clear.

What becomes the pop star in winter?

Not just literal winter, of the “Hey guys, it’s SNOWING” exclamation from The Boss as “Jersey weather” Jersey winter sets in around them on his farm, in his recording studio barn in his beloved New Jersey.

Do you go on the road and stay there, like Willie and Dylan? Do you try your hand at other forms of writing, or keep composing songs for a shrinking fanbase? Have you worn out your ability to reinvent yourself, or do you keep looking for new frontiers?

Springsteen may have run through every single one of those options. And yet he remains the consummate artist who “must be heard.” In the words of the fiction writer Harlan Ellison, “I have no mouth and I must scream.”

As Springsteen, reciting from his poetic/quasi-pretentious liner-notes-run-amok narration, sets up each song in the set — reflecting on this friend from his first band (The Castilles) passing, on others he’s lost, on “the debt I still owe my Freehold (NJ) brothers-in-arms,” on how “pop was always a raucous meditation,” his “45 year long conversation” with The E-Street Band, both a finely tuned motor and an outfit that can still “float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee” — you can’t help but wonder if there’s a better venue for this conversation, this “letter.”

Sure, he’s proven all he ever needs to prove, and then some, on the road. He’s dominated Broadway. Sold millions of records in his day. But this film and his last one, a doc about a C&W bend in the road on his musical journey (“Under Western Stars”) feels stiff, stale, self-serving and self-conscious.

Of course it’s in black and white. But at least he’s not wearing an ill-suited cowboy hat.

The songs are a pleasantly-forgettable collection in the usual Springsteen keys and time signatures and sound awfully similar to earlier works in his restless Jersey soul canon.

He and the band are doing what they love to do, in a low-impact/less-effort “comforts of home” way. It’s “not a job, it is a calling” he narrates, “a vocation.” But in the arid air of a recording studio the music loses its life, the “conversation” with the audience is absent and the “letter” really does feel like a letter — a little over-familiar, a bit long-winded.

“I took all the sunshine and pain,” he sings, rhyming it with “happiness and pain,” stretching the Big Noun in the title tune an extra syllable or two, as he is wont to do.

“I sent it in my Le-HE-ter to you.”

He preaches from Book of Pop Revelations, “life in 180 seconds or less,” and sings “As Ben E. King’s (“Stand by Me”) fills the air, baby that’s the power of prayer.”

There’s a little interplay with the band, a few “notes” after this or that take of the tunes.

“Roy (Bittan) don’t play it up higher, just don’t play it so LOW.”

But there’s a lot more narration than banter. Ho. Hum.

The idea of anybody staying friends with people you’ve worked with half a century is a miracle. And we all get old, reflective and sentimental, Sundance. No shame or dishonor in that.

“We’re taking this thing til we’re all in the box,” is Springsteen’s toast as they wrap things up. An artist’s compulsion to keep making art is to be revered.

But if you’re known for being the world’s greatest live act, maybe that’s how you present your new songs to the faithful (he had a hand-picked “audience” for “Under Western Stars,” in the barn) — in a roadhouse, drinks clinking and conversation murmuring, hoots or muted applause road-testing every single song, a “narration” that’s more improvised and less self-conscious.

He’s not the head-case Dylan became, not the sell-out Jimmy Buffett perfected, not an oldies act like every contemporary that doesn’t fit those first two comparisons.

Is there no one in his time-tested circle who can tell him, “Yeah, let’s get the band back together, but go out among THE PEOPLE when we do?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, alcohol

Cast: Bruce Springsteen, Little Steven Van Zandt, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg, Nils Lofgren, Patti Scialfa, Jake Clemons, Garry Tallent.

Credits: Thom Zimny, script.narration by Bruce Springsteen. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:26

The Golden Globe-winning 1972 documentary “I Am a Dancer” is a straightforward, old-fashioned “dancer and the dance” film, very much a product of its time. It’s heavy on sweaty rehearsals but dominated by performance sequences from “Sleeping Beauty,” “La Dame aux Camélia” and “La Sylphide.”

But its value beyond being an artifact of its era is that it preserves the dancer who is its focus, the Russian ex-pat Rudolf Nureyev, forever on film at his glorious peak.

He’d been celebrated for over a decade when Pierre Jourdan brought his (much bulkier than today) camera into rehearsal studios and close to the stage for classic performances.

Nureyev’s liberating defection from the Soviet Empire in 1961 had created a sensation beyond his fame within the performing arts. Jourdan’s film, by no means an “intimate” portrait, has the 33 year-old dancer shrugging that “I live in suitcase. My only ground is my work.”

And that’s what Jourdan captures with his camera, the sweat of being at the barre with the entire corps de ballet, intensely focused, putting in the way as a French class-leader hums “Da da du…Arabesque…dum dum dum Pas de deux.”

Dame Margot Fonteyn, the British ballerina, already a legend when Nureyev pursued her as a partner, marvels at how well they meshed on stage, this “boy, half my age” with all his grace and athleticism.

The film’s dated and superficial treatment of its handsome, mop-topped subject may seem at arm’s length by modern standards. But gay dancers didn’t speak of their sexuality in the early ’70s.

Jourdan instead lets the performances take over the film. Still, there’s this glorious sequence where the star, who evolved into a choreographer, director and even conductor before his career and life were cut short by AIDS, shows his corps exactly what he wants.

He’s in street clothes and boots, and he swoops right in with all the ballerinas, boots thundering at every landing, teaching them the precise gesture, pose and position he desires.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking

Cast: Rudolf Nureyev, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Glen Tetley, narrated by Bryan Forbes

Credits: Written and directed by Pierre Jourdan. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:32

A father bounces his child of three on his lap in bed.

In his mind’s eye, he has a different haircut, is fur clad like a Norseman of old, rowing the blond child to a rocky, Dark Ages shore.

It’s a fantasy world of their own creation, a quest he and the child are making up as they go along — him providing the muscle, the kid, babbling and inventing in Aussie-accented English, naming things, interacting with a fairy and learning the rules.

“If we see goblins?”

“We KILL’em!”

It takes a while to determine the beautiful, long-haired child is a boy, that his name is Bodhi.

We meet his mother at about the time we notice that some of Dad’s story game play is happening in a hospital bed.

Father and son are weaving a long-form fantasy around that which we don’t speak about, or that which few of us are comfortable talking about with our children — death.

“But I don’t LIKE games about being dead!”

Writer, director and star Mark Webber has been in films since the late ’90s (“Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,””Laggies,” “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot”). When he writes and directs his own work (“Flesh and Blood”), he tends to tell stories about family WITH family.

“The Place of No Words” has Webber and wife Teresa Palmer (“Lights Out,” “Hacksaw Ridge,” “Point Break”) playing a married couple entertaining and trying to figure out a way to explain “Daddy’s sick” to their little boy, Bodhi Palmer.

It’s a somber, reflective and magically set fantasy in the vein of “Where the Wild Things Are,” with symbolic monsters to be faced and bested, befriended or at least accepted. But the real magic of the story might be the utterly natural way this family acts like a family, with a precocious, unaffected and engaging child the glue that holds it all together.

They filmed this indie jewel in Wales in between seasons of Mom’s SkyTV series, “A Discovery of Witches.”

Mom looks haunted, gaunt at times. “It’s been so heavy around here,” she confides to a friend. But she’s got to keep up bubbly appearances even as her husband Mark has reached “a place of acceptance.”

The film has literary allusions and a visual tone that beautifully matches an overcast “real” world with the rocky hills and mountains and moss-covered trees of father-and-son’s place of escape.

It’s not a deep treatment of a serious subject. But it is an affecting one, made more so by the players groping and grasping at emotions that strike a balance between parental sheltering of a child, protecting him from ugly reality, and the need to gently remove that shelter at just the right moment.

You have to be in the mood for it, but “The Place of No Words” is a touching, sweet and intimate fantasy unlike most any film you’ve seen, save for its much more expensive and less moving antecedent, “Where the Wild Things Are.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, some fantasy violence

Cast: Mark Webber, Bodhi Palmer, Teresa Palmer

Credits: Written and directed by Mark Webber. A Gravitas release.

Running time: 1:35