Movie Nation

There’s something amusingly disorienting about the creature feature “Shortcut.”

It’s an Italian production set in modern-day rural Italy, with a 1960s vintage Italian bus filled with English schoolkids, and an English-speaking bus driver.

Read the fine print on the sign in the bus window above. “S. Peter International School.” That doesn’t answer all the questions. Why does the Italian escaped convict who hijacks the bus (David Keyes) have an English accent?

Anyway, what we have here is an Italian quicky for the international market, a horror tale with a location — an unused tunnel complex — a somewhat clumsy English-ain’t-my-first-language screenplay, kids, a nicely-restored bus and a monster.

Could be fun, right?

Five kids are on this bus — lumpy goof Karl (Zander Emlano), smart-girl-with-glasses Queenie (Molly Dew) whom they nickname “IQ,” quiet Chris (Jack Kane) in the hoodie and earbuds, budding artist Bess (Sophie Jane Oliver) and proto-punk leather-jacketed Reg (Zak Sutcliffe).

They banter with the driver (Terence Anderson) on their scenic mountain drive — Home? Field trip? Back to Britain?

Then they hit a road block. No worries, driver Joe knows a shortcut. None of them see the just-buried hand sticking out of the dirt at that road block. None notice the bones scattered along the back road that throws them into the clutches of the Bad Guy with a Gun (Keyes).

They quickly ID him as an escaped con on the run, a killer known to “love teenagers” and nicknamed “The Tongue Eater.”

“I know what DEATH tastes like,” he hisses. And it isn’t “chicken.”

Karl has just enough time to blurt “He’s gonna kill us ALL” when, as things turn out, escaped convict Pedro Minghella is the least of their problems. There’s something OUT there.

“We’re trapped in a tunnel and we’re all gonna DIE!” is Karl’s update.

Horror movie tropes are strictly-observed — splitting up, medieval torches always handy, the girl who says “I really have to PEE,” etc.

A friend gets taken, and other kids keep calmly calling his name, over and over, as if they can’t hear his BLOODcurdling screams and cries, mid-devouring, mere yards away.

The kids are a pleasant-enough collection of “types.” There are a couple of decent “gotchas” here, and director Alessio Liguiri (“In the Trap”) uses the darkness of his subterranean settings well.

But the wheels come off “Shortcut” pretty much the moment the kids have to flee that bus.

The problem solving involved in escaping a ruthless, armed serial killer nicknamed “The Tongue Eater” whom you’re trapped on a bus with would have been a lot more interesting than anything screenwriter Daniele Cosci cooks up for the thing “that isn’t human.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, gory supernatural violence, profanity

Cast: Jack Kane, Molly Dew, Zak Sutcliffe, Sophie Jane Oliver, Zander Emlano, David Keyes and Terence Anderson

Credits: Directed by Alessio Liguiri, script by Daniele Cosci. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:21

If there’s such a thing as “universal humor,” it’s got to be toilet-based.

Planet to planet, galaxy by galaxy — excrement, poop, caca, dung — no matter how you polish it, a turd’s a turd. And talking about it, showing it, finding new ways to goof on the most basic of bodily functions is always going to be funny, no matter the means of communication.

“Alien Addition” is a stoner comedy from New Zealand about Kiwi potheads visited by aliens who seem to be searching the tractless void of space for their next high.

And what these hemorrhoid-headed saucer-steering voyagers are REALLY into is “beautiful, chunky texture” and “spicey,” and shouldn’t be wasted in septic tanks. Oh no.

Music video veteran Shae Sterling tells this story through the eyes, subtitle-worthy accents, slang and values of rural North Islanders, Maori mostly.

They like their pot, sure. But they’re hooked on the board game “Galaxy Gods,” each one quick to play the “alien” card. The only excitement in their lives is racing, by SUV, dirt bike and tuner car, to the local pool hall and pub where there’s always the chance that some cute backpacking tourist from South America will fall for a pickup line.

“If you were a banana, I’d SPLIT you…or um, if you were a banana, I’d find you APPEALING!”

But when Riko’s daft auntie (Veronica Edwards) claims “I seen an eyeball in the toilet,” nobody takes her seriously. She mixes up salt for sugar in her biscuits and can’t remember how to make a decent pot of tea. She’s lost it.

Riko (Jimi Jackson) soon finds out he and his mates were wrong. And after the shock of stumbling into the beeping, bleeping, burping swaybacked space travelers, whom he calls Gurgus and Jeff (Mel Price and Steven Samuel Johnston), he’s even more shocked by their priorities — getting a buzz on.

And what suits their atomizing alien bong best? Poop.

Sterling sets up a more interesting comedy than he delivers. The gang of aimless 20somethings Riko hangs with (Tane Huata, Tukairangi Maxwell and Harry Summerfield) are hilarious, their profane banter the basis of many a goofy boy-bonding tale in a place and in a culture (Maori, mostly) we never see on the screen.

This is just his jumping off point, though, as Riko — after an in-the-shower freak-out of discovery — proceeds to bond with his “visitors,” who even have a voice decoder so that they can speak the same language.

“Could you change your voice? Cuz you sound Australian.”

Can’t have that.

A rugby lesson, a thrift-store makeover, stumbling on stage at a strip club, gambling, clubbing, all this stuff is crammed into a ditzy and dizzying first 40 minutes or so.

That “Precious”-sized “Flaming Red River Burger” joint waitress (JoJo Waaka) with the outrageously libidinous come-ons? She’ll play a big part in how things play out. So will the rest of the lads. Eventually.

The villain here is a hoax-pushing “science blogger” (Thomas Sainsbury) who, with his more ethical assistant (Ayham Ghalayini), predicted these aliens’ arrival and is convinced his reputation will be made if he can capture and autopsy them.

In its earliest, giddiest scenes, you really have no idea where any of this is going. The colorful cast reminds you of a dozen classic films about aimless youth set in the world’s out-of-the-way places.

And then the blue hemorrhoids show up, and the generic blogger-villain, and Sterling scrambles to find something novel and funny to do with them.

Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn’t.

Still, Jackson makes a great tour guide for local life — in BFE, NZ — with a trip to the big city of Auckland in a stolen hearse as a bonus. The stoner humor works, the “bum hole” stuff runs out of gas (ahem) quicker than all involved seem to realize.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, drug use, scatological humor

Cast: Jimi Jackson, Thomas Sainsbury, JoJo Waaka, Harry Summerfield, Ayham Ghalayini, Tane Huata, Tukairangi Maxwell and Veronica Edwards.

Credits: Written and directed by Shae Sterling. A Sept.29 Zonic TV release (available on various streaming platforms, Amazon, etc).

Running time: 1:36

William Oliver “Ollie” Stone, child of Eastern privilege who eschewed at least some of that advantage to go through hard knocks on his own, a Vietnam Vet who enlisted and fought as an infantryman, later a pacifist and outspoken critic of American foreign policy and values, shock impact screenwriter and artful, sometimes poetic director — they’re all present in the 70something filmmaker’s rise-to-glory memoir, “Chasing the Light.”

I’ve been a fan pretty much since “Salvador.” My first reporting assignment at my first newspaper, where I was a freelance critic had me take five Vietnam War veterans to a showing of “Platoon” and buy them coffee at a local diner afterwards. Their harrowing stories, and tears at seeing their experience reflected so “accurately,” stick with me.

Stone remains a fascinating study in contradictions, champion of the underdog and occasionally an on-set bully, macho yet lefty, generous to every collaborator and teacher who helped him “make it,” learn his craft and get better at it, but almost always hitting them with a backhanded compliment or two. Or three.

From the beginning he has been an artist of stark dualities and excesses. He sees himself as Odysseus or a pirate, a rogue operator outside “The System.”

He comes off in print the way he’s always come off in interviews — passionate, thoughtful and somewhat dogmatic. I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, about his “Vietnamese POV” Vietnam film, “Heaven and Earth” (the third in his “trilogy” about his war — after “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July”), about “World Trade Center,” his post-9/11 tribute to first responders and most “pro-American” work, and that Latin American politics doc he did a few years back. He’s long had that confidence of his opinions, certitude that he’s “right” in a historical sense, quick to analyze a performance, a colleague’s film or judge his own — sometimes harshly.

There’s a lot of psychoanalyzing of himself, his parents, their failed marriage, his own failures and insecurities in “Chasing the Light.” He talks about his drug abuse, hits a few romantic relationships, and consults his decades of diaries to remember everything from his father’s death to his first brushes with triumph.

I didn’t recall that his first trip to Vietnam was before the “escalation,” as an English teacher. I had no idea he was in LRRPs in Vietnam (Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol). That’s infantry on steroids.

I knew he had boarding school and Yale acceptance (he didn’t stick it out long) in his pedigree.

I didn’t realize he’d studied under wunderkind alumnus Martin Scorsese at NYU.

He understudied/worked for/was critiqued by the great screenwriter Robert Bolt (“Lawrence of Arabia,” “Doctor Zhivago”) in his 20s.

For this book about his long, long road to fame — “Seizure” (nobody saw it) to “The Hand” (a few more saw it) to “Salvador” (ditto) and then “Platoon” — Stone traces everything, from his scripts to his own saga, back to “The Odyssey.”

Stone’s lasting obsessions aren’t just Vietnam and America’s misguided way of throwing its weight around the world. It’s The Doors and Jim Morrison, as he quotes The Doors often, sees himself (and occasionally others) in Lizard King terms at several points in his memoir.

He details the ordeals involved in each early directing effort, and in his many screenwriting challenges — “Midnight Express,” “Year of the Dragon” and “Scarface” among them. Those are some of the most fascinating chapters in the book. He says Brian DePalma’s “operatic” take on his “Scarface” script has grown on him. Some.

Of Billy Hayes, the “hero” of “Midnight Express,” passed off in the media and the movie as just “a kid who made a mistake” — “stunned” that Hayes, contrary to the way he told his story, was caught on his “fourth” hash smuggling run out of Turkey, that Hayes led people to believe he was heterosexual, heightening (if that’s possible) the horror of prison sexual assaults and encounters.

“How do you live with yourself? I have no problem believing he can.”

Stone opens the book with an introduction to his love/hate relationship with the mercurial, motor-mouthed blowhard James Woods, telling tales out of school of Woods’ tantrums and fear-filled experiences filming “Salvador” on the fly in Mexico in the ’80s, fleeing a cavalry charge shot too early, exaggerating the danger and “Stone didn’t know what he was doing…but I did” way Woods described the experience.

Having interviewed Woods myself, a bantam rooster who can’t wait to work his (alleged) IQ into any introductory conversation, Stone seems on the mark in picking at the man being “the most insecure” movie star of them all. They worked together several times after their near-brawling “Salvador” experience.

The compliments mixed with slaps extends from Alan Parker, director of “Midnight Express,” who took his script and never invited him to the set, to Dale Dye, the formidable Vietnam vet and military consultant on many a war movie, who developed his “boot camp” for the cast of “Platoon,” and repeated that in other war films he worked on. Dye made “Platoon’s” cast a unit, with the right look and jumpy reflexes Stone remembered from his service. But keep politics out of the conversation, and Dye’s racial tolerance — filming in the Philippines — wasn’t the most enlightened.

Then again, he wasn’t the guy who kicked a Filipino production manager in the ass, on set, in front of the entire crew. That was Stone, who airs lots of his dirty laundry, even if he takes his shot at “explaining” or spinning that behavior.

He also quotes freely from interviews conducted by a biographer who talked to many of those he worked for

Stone is wise to limit this volume to his early years. His career has been winding down, although he has a small scale film, “White Lies,” in pre-production, “Snowden” didn’t set the world on fire and the Castro, Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin interview docs he’s made in the last haven’t done much for his reputation.

He turned 74 in mid September, and probably needed a better book editor to fact check his memories. He confuses the F4 Phantoms used in Vietnam with F16s — repeatedly (They didn’t come into service until ten years after his 1968 battles “in country”), gets a major plot detail wrong in “Gone With the Wind” just to make an analogy to his French mother taking up with his WWII American command staff officer father work. He thinks one-time producer-nemesis Dino DeLaurentis opened a movie studio in the middle of their ’80s kerfuffle in “Wilmington, Delaware” (Wilmington, NC sport).

But it’s a fair self-portrait, with enough colorful detail of research trips, filming ordeals and failing and failing and failing before finally succeeding, fine fodder for a film biography of one of the cinema’s grand mavericks.

“Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing and Surviving ‘Platoon,’ ‘Midnight Express,’ ‘Scarface,’ ‘Salvador’ and the Movie Game” by Oliver Stone. Houghton Miflin, 328 pages. $28.

I can see the Academy’s point, but perhaps the emphasis should be on below the line production gigs, where diversity is a bigger problem, might be the first step here.

We’re already seeing films where checkbox casting is calling attention to itself. It’s not doing anything for quality. Diversify production and studio jobs and a wider range of stories are told with a much wider range of characters.

It was 1951, and nobody was making movies about racism and African American rage back then.

Much of the cast was local amateurs. As it was filmed in Argentina but set in Chicago, that makes for some odd accents.

The director was French, not exactly an expert on American race relations or African American voices. Sound was looped and dubbed to compensate for that.

The intended star, acclaimed in the Broadway production, was tied up in customs in South Africa and couldn’t make it to the set.

But “Native Son” isn’t just a troubled production of legend, and not just an artifact, a cinematic curiosity. Newly-restored to its most complete version ever, it has crackling moments and blasts of defiance and elevated rhetoric.

Richard Wright was 43 and too old to play his greatest creation, Bigger Thomas. He could act, but was never more than adequate in a part that demands charisma, seething resentment and menace. But he took on the daunting role and the film was made, a decade after Wright’s incendiary novel came out, seven years after becoming an Orson Welles Broadway play.

It’s a conventional story — young man with a police record gets a job as chauffeur for the local white slumlord and his family. He takes the rebellious daughter, at her request, to a Black nightclub where his girlfriend (Gloria Madison) happens to be singing. The daughter (Jean Wallace) and her leftist beau (Gene Michael) get drunk.

Bad things happens when Bigger takes her home, and he winds up killing her. He tries to cover his tracks as the cops close in, but we know how this is going to turn out.

Here’s what jumps off the screen 70 years later — cops dropping the “n-word” like they always have and figure they always will.

“I like n—–s. But I like’m in their place!”

Jan the leftist “white-splains” being Black to Bigger. “One day we’re gonna smash that Jim Crow system, and when we do it’ll STAY trashed!”

The tipsy daughter makes a request.

“Hey Bigger, can’t you sing? Aren’t all colored people supposed to sing?”

Her labor agitator/racial equality leftist date white-splains for her, too.

“Whites only let colored people sing the blues.”

There’s a gay snitch in Bigger’s neighborhood in the “Black Belt” of Chicago, with pool halls, theaters and bars catering to the African American Diaspora there.

Bigger’s already been in trouble with the law, and has hopes of pulling new heists when we meet him. But neither he nor his comrades have the nerve. As he stares off into space, it seems that life itself is an utter dead end.

“When you’re Black, it’s better to keep your dreams locked in your heart.”

There’s nothing sentimental about the film or the novel it’s based on, little “Raisin in the Sun” pathos. Director Pierre Chenal keeps the lighting dark and shadowy and the tone grim.

Welles wanted to film “Native Son” himself, and never could. Wright probably figured this was his one chance to turn his book into the most popular art form of all. He was right. He died in 1960, just 52 years of age. And nobody else dared film the book until the ’80s.

But this early production, restored with its primitive, malnourished edges intact, is more than just a relic from an impoverished film shoot in the early 1950s. This “most complete version” has just enough film noir fury about it to hint at the classic it might have been, and plenty of B-movie pop to it even as it is.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcohol abuse, racial slurs

Cast: Richard Wright, Jean Wallace, Gloria Madison, Willa Pearl Curtis, Nicholas Joy, Charles Cane, George D. Green

Credits: Directed by Pierre Chenal, script by Pierre Chenal and Richard Wright, based on Wright’s novel. A Classic Pictures — Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:47

There’s arguing — not loud, not heated — at the funeral reception.

It was a Jewish funeral, and the debate is over the deceased’s last wish — to be cremated.

But there is no arguing over why “she” killed herself. Inez was bipolar, an addict in and out of AA.

Still, there is a mystery to “Inez & Doug & Kira,” one the survivors will try to piece together in this somber and engrossing if not-wholly-satisfying drama. The connections were there, however tenuous and fragile. The hurt and guilt linger.

Because it’s hard to hear cries for help with new urgency when you’ve been hearing them for years.

The debut feature of editor-turned-director Julia Kots is shrouded in pain, grounded in addiction and suicide. The actors — save for Tawny Cypress (TV’s “The Blacklist”), who has to play the manic Inez — mimic a kind of exhaustion that a lot of people will recognize.

Because loving and caring about someone with problems at this level is as draining as relationships get.

“She had a talent for driving people apart,” might be the best description of our dead protagonist.

Michael Chernus of TV’s “Tommy” is Doug, a New York magazine writer. Talia Thiesfield is Kira, Doug’s partner and “baby momma.”

Inez was her twin sister, and flashbacks show us how tight they were. Doug was Inez’s reluctant but devoted sponsor. How that came to be is interesting. How he came to be with Kira even more so.

Kots takes us into these interwoven lives in baby steps. One of the most gripping and realistic AA meetings ever put on the screen is a highlight, but randy-frank sister chat about sex and men and circumcisions figure in, too.

Doug, for all his sponsorship sharing, has huge passages of Inez’s life he doesn’t know. He’s having nightmares with her in them.

Kira? She’s struggling to maintain calm through a difficult pregnancy. And she just buried her sister.

Kots, who also scripted “Inez & Doug & Kira” invents some marvelous details in everybody’s backstory, some of them seen in flashback, some glimpsed in dreams, others related in vivid word-portrait anecdotes.

The film has a tonal, visual and messaging consistently that honors the writer-director’s editing past. People from that film specialty know how difficult it is to keep the the whole in sync without maintaining it every single day in every shot and scene on the set.

The dialogue is unfussy, limited but rich. Telling a therapist he’s lost “my best friend” Doug wonders “if grownups even SAY that.”

“Cancer?” the shrink wants to know, getting him back on subject.

“Razor blades.”

The muted tone and funereal gloom that linger in the film gives it a mortician’s remove. We aren’t necessarily moved by this tragedy and the ways those who survived contributed to it or failed to avert it.

But suicide can be like that. Even in the “easy answers,” there’s little satisfaction and no comfort.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, substance abuse, profanity

Cast: Tawny Cypress, Michael Chernus and Talia Thiesfield

Credits: Written and directed by Julia Kots. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:38

Ok, none of the folks involved in making “This is Spinal Tap” way back when has had great demands on their time these past few years.

Yes, it would have been interesting if they’d taken a chance at reviving the band/screen comedy in 20 years ago.

Are their ironic laughs in guys KISS age “getting the band back together? Maybe.

The Hollywood Reporter says that ‘This is Spinal Tap’ co-creators Harry Shearer, Rob Reiner, Michael McKean and Christopher Guest have got a deal that could potentially revive the franchise https://t.co/I8zfzI5095 https://t.co/8wKWz9UH4n https://twitter.com/THR/status/1307371424596795397?s=20

The creators of the Indonesian romantic comedy “Whipped” play versions of themselves, which is the cleverest thing this film (“Bucin,” in Indonesian) has going for it.

To wit — Chandra Liow is ID’d in the opening credits as “single” and the director. He’s an arrogant doofus in the movie, bragging that “I am the MASTER of escape rooms” as he and his comrades must get out of one as part of their “extreme” course on “How not to be ‘whipped’ in relationships.”

Chandra isn’t “master” of anything except declaring his expertise and stealing credit. Repeat after me, “Just like a director.”

Andovi Da Lopez, an actor, plays a neurotic, romantic actor — given to singing to his too-beautiful girlfiend Kiki (Widika Sidmore), indulging her every whim or impulse purchase. He is a poster boy for “whipped.”

Tommy Limm is also an actor, haplessly engaged to Julia (Karina Salim) here, crushed under her weepy tantrums over all the wedding planning.

And “the smart one,” the guy who might get them out of the escape rooms their “course” throws at them? That would be Jovial “Jo” Da Lopez, who wears glasses (signaling “smart” in cinema-ese) and is at the stare-at-our-phones state of his four-year relationship with Cilla (Kezia Aletheia).

The guys wake up from being drugged in an escape room where a lit clock tells them how much time they have to master a task, and a sign that changes from “Patience is Key” to “Honesty is Key” to “Courage is Key.”

Course director Vania (Susan Sameh) barks out orders and clues via a PA system. She’s apparently a Phd candidate in psychology, which makes this “business” her rats-in-a-maze experiment. Beautiful sadist, anyone?

A grievous flaw in this script is Jovial’s sloppy sense of timeline. The “course” isn’t something the four contend with, all in one go. No, they leave, go back to their lonely or henpecked or checked-out-of-the-relationship lives, where shopping gags, yoga classes, karaoke, paintball and wedding planning is supposed to provide more humor and insight on why they’re “Whipped.”

That would have been better handled in flashbacks, streamlining the picture and adding urgency to the escape rooms.

Oh, and making the outside-the-course scenes funnier would have been a BIG help. The only amusing bits are in that escape room, to be honest. And attempts to give this nonsensical story a dark edge — suspense — fail utterly.

Without the sight gags, mugging and wordplay to goose it, “Whipped” just flails away, a lot of energy expended on nothing all that funny or particularly charming.

MPAA Rating: TV-14, innuendo

Cast: Andovi Da Lopez, Jovial Da Lopez, Tommy Limm, Chandra Liow, Susan Sameh, Widika Sidmore, Karina Salim and Kezia Aletheia

Credits: Directed by Chandra Liow, script by Jovial Da Lopez. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:37

One thing becomes obvious in this ambitious, star-studded yet staid version of France’s infamous “Dreyfus Affair.” The officious, patriotic family man this scandal centered around was far from being the most fascinating character in his own tragedy.

If the great José Ferrer, at his 1950s peak, and novelist/screenwriter Gore Vidal and this ensemble can’t wring more pathos of this crushing injustice than “I Accuse,” we’d all best stick to “The Life of Emile Zola (1937).”

The story of a Jewish staff officer unjustly accused, convicted and sentenced to Devil’s Island hangs heavy over French history. It was filmed three times in the 1930s alone (including Paul Muni’s “Zola” biopic). His name is invoked in “Papillon,” and his fate the object of much French soul-searching over Antisemitism and blind obedience of and trust in French institutions, most particularly the army, which railroaded this scapegoat and covered up the fact that they did.

Ferrer’s film, somewhat fictionalized, captures the baying of the mob at Dreyfus’ public stripping of his rank. So it wasn’t just the army that had it in for Jews.

But everybody around Dreyfus, in history and in the film, is more colorful — colorfully corrupt, like the real traitor/officer who sold French military secrets to the Germans in the 1890s, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy, given a Devil-may-care narcissism by the great Anton Walbrook (“The Red Shoes,” The 48th Parellel”) , colorfully Antisemitic, like the Army officer (George Coulouris of “Citizen Kane”) who fingers Dreyfus as a spy, colorfully dogmatic like Major DuPaty de Clam, a handwriting “expert” played by Inspector Clouseau’s future nemesis — Herbert Lom.

Against this, Ferrer’s Dreyfus is mere martyr, ramrod straight, defending his “honor” but broken by the tropical hell and isolation of Devil’s Island — dull.

Another drab hero is this film’s depiction of writer, philosopher and activist Emile Zola, whose famous screed “J’Accuse” has become shorthand for every person who rises up and shouts against a grave injustice. Emlyn Williams was cast in the part, and barely registers. And this is the most articulate, fiery, saintly-heroic figure in the tale.

“I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice…”

Ferrer, who also directed, ensures that this is a perfectly serviceable summary of the affair, even with the odd liberty taken with the facts. Viveca Lindfors suffers modestly as Mrs. Dreyfus, Leo Genn plays the commanding officer who spotted the cover-up and legendary character actors Donald Wolfit and Harry Andrews dress up the proceedings.

But it’s as if Ferrer, or at least the snarky gadfly Vidal, recognized the REAL star and focus should be the sleazy, lazy, greedy and amoral Esterhazy. Casting the normally heroic Walbrook in the part pulls us into the character, and even the lines describing him (by Williams’ Zola) suggest this is the movie Vidal wanted Ferrer to make.

“This Esterhazy is one of the most glorious liars that ever drew breath. Why, the authority of it, the poise; the man’s a genius!”

MPAA Rating: Approved

Cast: José Ferrer, Anton Walbrook, Viveca Lindfors, Leo Genn, Donald Wolfit, Harry Andrews, Herbert Lom, George Coulouris and Emlyn Williams

Credits: Directed by José Ferrer, script by Gore Vidal. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:39

The mystery and the guilt associated with it drives the cryptic Israeli drama “God of the Piano,” a movie that gives away so little that the viewer is invited to fill in around the edges, early and often.

Anat (Naama Preis) looks like a ballerina and plays the piano like a rising star of Israeli classical music. She’s so committed to her instrument that when her water breaks, mid-concert, she toughs it out to the end. Her obligations are to the composer, the audience and her instrument. The baby? It can wait.

He is born before his father (Ron Bitterman) can make it to the hospital. There’s a suggestion Dad might not be faithful.

So she’s there, by herself, when she gets bad news. Anat will consider the unthinkable in “solving” this problem, and when we meet her family, we understand. Composers, performers and teachers, their expectations for every new member of the clan are formidable.

Can little Idan live up to the family legacy? As we watch him (Andy Levi) emerge as an ideal and seemingly enthusiastic student, a playing and composing prodigy, taught by the very best, we think we have the answer.

“God of the Piano” is a brisk drama, with a narrow focus that means that it skips by without providing every answer to every question it asks. Like its central character, Anat, it is enigmatic, furtive.

She has a secret she’s keeping from her husband, her son, her family and the world. Like the protagonist of Poe’s “Tell-tale Heart” the guilt has to eat at her, right? Especially when she keeps getting mail from a school the hospital once recommended for her son.

And even so, that first secret leads her to others.

First-time feature director Itay Tal touches on many themes and ideas in this Hebrew language (with English subtitles) story, from fierce interfamilial competition to professional jealousy of the “Those who can, do, those who can’t, teach” variety, to a whole “nature vs. nurture” prejudice that reveals, in just a scene or two, what that word really means — “pre-judging.”

Classical music isn’t usually about bloodlines. It’s about who taught you and who taught her, hopefully all the way back to Chopin or Liszt or one of the giants. Here, that’s twisted.

A telling scene, Anat’s father and revered teacher (Ze’ev Shimshoni) visibly pales when he gives the kid a piece he wrote when he was the same age as the boy (12). Inad sight-reads it, playing beautifully, and in an “Amadeus” touch, proceeds to “improve it.” Damn his eyes.

That whole dynamic, that the child is preordained to greatness or mediocrity by blood and birth, is undercut in the film. It’s either troubling or amusing to consider, seeing as how this story all takes place in a land whose dominant culture lives as self-described “chosen people.”

Tal has created a spare and provocative debut feature, one that sucks you in even as he introduces more challenging ideas than he could possibly address fully in 80 spare minutes.

MPAA Rating: unrated,sex

Cast: Naama Preis, Andy Levi, Ze’ev Shimshoni

Credits: Written and directed by Itay Tal.  A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:21