Movie Nation

Only you know what your tolerance is for dark, grim stories that offer little hope for justice in an unjust world, little hope for hope itself, for that matter.

But “Watch List” is a bleak but riveting thriller worth girding yourself for and immersing yourself in. It’s a Filipino film directed by American Ben Rekhi (“The Ashram”) about a newly-widowed mother of three, a recovered junkie, caught up in the authoritarian slaughter of President Rodrigo Duterte.

“Extra judicial killings” is one of those phrases, like “ethnic cleansing,” that tidies up a murderous horror. That’s what “Watch List” is about, the rapid descent of a half-compliant culture into off-the-books but state-sanctioned murder and “disappearances.”

A police van empties out in Quezon City’s District 120. It’s part of Operation Tokhang, which news footage shows the Filipino strong man authorizing. They’re rounding up everybody ever caught and convicted of using or selling drugs, giving them the chance to “voluntarily” surrender.

Arturo (Jess Mendoza) answers the pounding at the door, insists he’s clean and long ago did his time for his crimes. Nope. “Volunteer” to go in, because you’re on the list. “Just come with us,” (in Filipino, with English subtitles) the cops urge.

But his wife, Maria (Alessandra de Rossi) asks questions, gets mouthy. Now they want to know HER name. A quick glance at the clipboard “list” produces an officious “HERE it is.” Maria’s “Let me SEE that” falls on deaf ears.

They’re both ordered to “register” and face the perp-walk jeering of neighbors, even as the grinning cops assure them that the signing in, oaths they must take, and dancing that’s to start their latest “rehabilitation” is “nothing.”

They go home. Arturo kisses her and their three kids good night before going to work. He never comes back, gunned down in a drive-by. The cops are there within moments, but no, there were no “witnesses.” Strangely, all the CCTV cameras at the scene “were down.”

Lt. Ventura (Jake Macapagal) shrugs, says they have no leads, makes Maria sign some papers, and that’s that.

But good luck finding a job as a widow with three kids when you’ve been on the news, when everybody nearby knows you were a drug user and “once an addict, always an addict,” because the murderously corrupt government keeps telling them that.

The Catholic Church? The iconography is everywhere, but there is no priest or sanctuary that can offer Maria comfort. All that’s left for it is for her to beg for a job, as an informant, with the very people she suspects arranged the murder of her husband, and covered it up.

Ventura makes the arrangement. Alvin (Arthur Acuña) will be her handler, allegedly a “vigilante” but actually an undercover cop. She will find information, get dealers to sell to her so that they can be “caught in the act.”

Or so she thinks. Being taught to fire a pistol from the back of a motorbike tells her, and us, this is how it’s done. If you’re on the “list,” judgement has already been passed. No arrest, no trial, just execution.

Maria’s “real” motive for getting mixed up in this is to protect her kids, the oldest of whom (Micko Laurente) is already spending too much time with a drug dealing cousin (Timothy Malabot).

Can she save him and his siblings? What will she do once she knows how these “EJKs” (extra judicial killings) are meted out, who stands to gain and where the corruption really lies?

British born Italian-Filipino actress de Rossi perfectly embodies a woman with a past, but with little in that past to help her in her newly-widowed predicament. Sure, she can be of help to the cops.

“If there’s one thing I remember, it’s how to score.”

She tries to assure her confused, grieving children that their father was not a pusher, that he was “a good man.”

But the more she learns, the harder it is to hide her despair and her desperation. The same thing could happen to her that happened to Arturo, and Maria is willing to cross a lot of lines to prevent that. de Rossi never lets us see the gears turning, what Maria might be planning to do with all she learns and the terror that’s being unleashed on her country’s most vulnerable.

Director Rekhi maintains that mystery and steadily ramps up the suspense as we follow his heroine down a rabbit hole filled with vipers.

And the deeper she and we go down that “Watch List,” the more doubts we have that anybody will get out of this alive, much less with a sense that justice will be done or will even be allowed.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse

Cast: Alessandra de Rossi, Jake Macapagal, Arthur Acuña, Jess Mendoza, Micko Laurente and Timothy Mabalot.

Credits: Directed by Ben Rekhi, script by Ben Rekhi, Rona Lean Sales. A Dark Sky/Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:39

A layer of “icky” hangs over the French drama “An Easy Girl (Une fille facile)” that highlights the truism that “The French are different from us.”

That French reluctance to “tsk tsk” predatory older men hooking up with very young women or girls, which tends to explain their Polanski Tolerance, remains creepy. Even if a woman directs the film, even as it has plenty of judgement about the practice and warnings about the perils it entails for the girls and women, “icky” still applies.

This coming-of-age story, a Cannes award winner, is about a pivotal summer in the life of 16 year-old Naïma (Mina Farid), a summer she spends with her voluptuous “sophisticated” cousin Sofia (Zahia Dehar).

Sofia is all curves and makeup and topless tanning, seemingly unflappable about how she comes off, a Bridget Bardot bombshell who aspires to look like — perhaps with the aid of plastic surgery — Sophia Loren.

Sofia never carries cash, never worries about picking up a check, and is bedecked in baubles and designer clothing and accessories. And what impressionable Naïma learns from her this summer on the French Riviera — where Naïma’s single-mom is a luxury hotel maid — is what the English language gossip websites have labeled “yachting.”

Sofia turns heads and draws men like bees to honey. A semi-secluded piece of rocky beach, the top comes off and binoculars are raised, boats approach. And eventually, invitations come with them.

“Carpe diem” is tattooed on her lower back. “Feelings don’t matter” to Sofia any more than the judgment of others. Naïma just broke up with her boyfriend.

“What did he give you?” is Sofia’s question (in French, with English subtitles). She’s speaking rhetorically, but also materially Sofia is a big “Put it on Mr. Montero’s account” shopper.

That’s her latest catch. Andres (Nuno Lopes) and his friend Phillipe (Benoît Magimel of “The Piano Teacher”) are idling through summer on his motor yacht, “Winning Streak.” They while away the hours, picking at a guitar, contemplating the nature of wealth and beauty.

“Beauty you don’t want to possess, but admire.”

“You have to be a little poor, or have been poor to be really rich,”to best appreciate wealth and its trappings.

Sofia and Andres start a fling and Naïma — forsaking a summer internship in the resort kitchen and acting auditions with her gay BFF Dodo (Lakdhar Dridi) — tags along, not as chaperone but as the fourth wheel.

“I’d like to be a ‘dangerous woman,’ too!”

Phillipe takes on the role of fatherly concern and conscience. Casting a believable, ordinary-looking girl as Naïma makes that notion an easy sell.

Sex, skin, scenery and aspirational affluence are the Netflix selling points here. But director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski made this a drama, not a comedy. She’s leaning towards cultural commentary.

The men range from misogynist trolls to “I’m rich so she’s within reach” predators.

Sofia is more self-aware than she lets on, even if she seems impossible to insult. But there’s no cunning to her guile. She’s recently lost her mother and she’s found a way to live. Naïma must be tempted by this, and either reach for it or reject it.

A boat trip to an Italian isle puts them in the company of the wealthy and worldly Calypso (Clotilde Courau), who “tests” Sofia and reveals a snobbery that suggests “yachting” has been around a lot longer than crazydaysandnights.net.

The morality here is as predictable as the story arc, and the unsavory taste of it all a turn-off. Dehar’s got a hint of Kardashian in her exaggerated features, which adds to that.

But if the French are going to start looking askance at their cinema-defined version of gold-digging and April-September “romances,” good for them. Seeing something as “icky” doesn’t make the rest of the world prudes.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, explicit sex, nudity, teen drinking

Cast: Mina Farid, Zahia Dehar, Benoît Magimel, Nuno Lopes, Lakdhar Dridi, Clotilde Courau

Credits: Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, script by Rebecca Zlotowski and Teddy Lussi-Modeste. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

Whoa. Did not see THAT coming.

A comedy series that began life as a cute (ish), lame (ish) NBC promo package to entice American viewers into watching British soccer?

A show that tries to turn Jason Sudeikis, who has spent his career on the Summer’s Eve side of the character actor spectrum, into a drawling Power of Positive Thinking pussycat?

A series where “Coach” analogies are a real worry?

“Ted Lasso” has “kind of slipped by me” written all over it. Making it for a streaming service, where R-rated language rules the day, hints at a “Coach’ with Lots of Cursing.” But as the cursing will be of the British persuasion, and the “fish out of water” story trope endures because, well, it works — let’s give it a try.

“Scrubs” seems to be the operative analogy with this often funny and occasionally quite sentimental series on Apple TV. Bill Lawrence of “Scrubs” had a hand in turning those NBC promos into a season-long story of a goofy, relentlessly-upbeat college football coach lured from his FCS (not “Power Five”) Wichita State (they no longer play football) job to coach an also-ran British premiere league club.

And if it isn’t “Death of a Salesman,” or “Vice Principals” or “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” it’s perfectly watchable low-hanging-fruit TV, with funny supporting players (including co-creator Brendan Hunt) and a flurry of “Innocents Abroad” style jokes about a naive American crashing into British slang, jargon, accents and culture in soccer-mad Richmond, where AFC Richmond wallows in mediocrity.

Lasso (Sudeikis) and the too-aptly-named Coach Beard (Hunt) are career sidekicks, hurled into this situation because the new owner (regal Hannah Waddington of “Game of Thrones”) wants the team she won in a divorce to burn to the ground, as revenge on the repellent, rich ex (Anthony Head, perfect).

The Lasso/Beard dynamic is played-up just enough to score a couple of laughs every episode. Yes, Beard is the semi-silent “brains” of the operation — doing the homework that hyper glad-hander Lasso doesn’t. Yes, the situation is “Major League” trite, with whole episodes devoted to “teamwork” building, torture by tabloids and even vanquishing a silly superstition.

But as with “Scrubs,” the fun in the series comes from the banter, the caricature/characters revealing hidden dimensions, skills and gifts and heart.

Hit or miss wordplay is a part of that. The star player is a preening diva named Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster). Teaching him “teamwork” involves befriending his Internet personality/spokesmodel girlfriend (Juno Temple, a delight). She’s worried about headlines from a photograph of her and Lasso together.

“Jamie’s Tart breaks Tartt’s Heart…the power of RHYMING in this country!”

Jamie? He just wants the endorsements, the elevation to an elite team, the fame and glory. He wants the crowd singing his little goal-scoring celebration song, set to “Baby Shark.”

“Jamie TARTT doo doo doo doo du-du!”

Teammate Roy (Brett Goldstein, terrific) is the ageing, furious ex-star on his last legs, cursing and threatening one and all and utterly intolerant of this “wanker” brought in to ruin the team.

As indeed are the punters in the pubs and the stands.

Lasso? He lets every insult, every evisceration in the form of a “question” at his press conferences, roll right off his back. Their next opponent is a “tough cookie.”

“Know what you do with ‘tough cookies, don’t-ya? DIP’em in milk!”

Sudeikis, playing against type, may be the big surprise here. He is, if not quite charming, at least disarmingly-grating in this In-over-his-Head turn.

Hunt’s Coach Beard? He’s Robert Wuhl in this riff on “Bull Durham.” His rare lines are limited to “explaining” how “They call cleats ‘boots'” and a single last moment assessment of every opponent, delivered in the locker room as they hit the “pitch, not field.”

“SPEED on the outside!”

Nick Mohammad plays the shy, downtrodden “kit man” (equipment manager) who, because Ted talks to EVERYbody as his real gift is evaluating talent, chemistry and intelligence, becomes a part of the brain trust. Toheeb Jimoh is a Nigerian kid who might be the star of tomorrow if he ever asserts himself.

There’s a gruff but lovable pub owner, a “soccer girl” schoolkid who schools Ted with her feet every now and then and a team of misfits who’ve got to be taught to “Believe!”

Yeah, I know how that sounds. But if you like sports cliches served up in “Scrubs” (Zach Braff does some directing on “Ted Lasso”), it’s not a bad way to kill a half hour a week.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, lots of swearing, drinking, adult situations

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddington, Juno Temple, Brendan Hunt, Brett Goldstein, Toheeb Jimoh and Nick Mohammad.

Credits: Created by Brendan Hunt, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence and Jason Sudeikis. An Apple TV release.

Running time: 10 episodes @34:00 each

How do you feel about Ethan Hawke, playing the mistreated inventor Nikola Tesla in a hoarse, unaccented whisper, stepping up to the mike and covering the Tears for Fears hit, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World?”

We’ve already seen the artifice of writer-director Michael Almereyda in many a scene in his take on “Tesla.” Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) whips out an iPhone after one “never-happened” meeting with his former protege and rival.

That seems right. Surely Tesla would have been an Android guy.

Obvious moments of rear projection take Tesla to a World’s Fair, onto the plains of Colorado, into long-closed (black and white images) restaurants, street scenes and the like.

At one point, a keen-eared listener can hear modern ambulance sirens wailing in the distant background on the soundtrack. FIRE the soundmixer! Or, um, leave it in. Why not?

As our narrator, Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson of the recent “Robin Hood” debacle), daughter of robber baron J.P. and a Tesla flirtation, has already looked at the camera, shown us her laptop and demanded that we “Google” Tesla and Edison. We’re well–immersed in this whole “fourth-wall” breaking, modernish lark of a bio pic.

One ugly fact harshing that vibe is the cruel realization, some minutes into Hawke’s re-teaming with his modern-set “Hamlet” director, that Hawke might be the third best big screen Tesla to come along. In “The Prestige,” the charismatic David Bowie did for the inventor of AC current and most of what made radio possible what he did for Andy Warhol in “Basquiat” — made him other-worldly and cool. And Nicholas Hoult’s supporting turn in “The Current War: Director’s Cut” was sharply defined as well.

Hawke? He mumble-whispers his way through the notoriously introverted Tesla, not taking even a stab at an Eastern European accent. That he sings in this same voice is kind of rubbing our noses in it.

Couple that with a generally inferior supporting cast, when compared with the all-star Oscar bait of “A Current War,” and you’ve got the lesser of two Tesla tales.

But Almereyda tells a story that carries on after “A Current War,” and begins before it. It is Tesla-focused, and you don’t have to be a Tesla cultist to get at least a little charge (ahem) out of what he’s done with the man.

He’s not shy about adding some fanciful “what might have beens,” and not just the singing, cell phones and laptops. What if Edison had apologized for his slights, public relation bites and legal fights after those AC/DC wars, and they’d teamed up?

What if they’d settled their earlier dispute over compensation in Edison’s lab with an ice cream cone fight?

What if Tesla hadn’t let George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan, nobody’s idea of The Next Michael Shannon of “Current”) plead/con him into giving up his royalties on “polyphase” generators and alternating current patents?

“A sensible man,” Miss Morgan intones, “would have said, ‘Wait a minute. Let me talk to a lawyer.”

The Irish Hewson manages a perfect, deadpan Gilded Age American accent as narrator/flirt Morgan. Similarly, Rebecca Dayan as famed actress Sarah Bernhardt, a fan and friend of both Edison and Tesla (who was smitten), gives us just enough French to make a convincingly Divine Sarah.

Not enough is done with Tesla’s European friend, assistant and fellow inventor Szigeti (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), still a welcome Hungarian addition to the “true” part of the story.

The framework of something original and engaging is here, if only Almereyda had seen it, and maybe had a little talk with Hawke about splitting the difference between “Method” and “comprehension” in his line-readings.

Those of us fascinated by Tesla’s tragedy are going to see this, no matter what. But “Tesla” is a film that peaks — as the inventor himself did — when his alternating current lights up the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 (World’s Fair).

A shy man in caught up in the swirl of invention, glory, showmanship and hype, this is the most interesting part of the story and should dominate the movie — accolades here, a glimpse of Annie Oakley there.

Instead, we open at about the time Edison’s first wife died, in August of 1884, for a scene the darkened lab where the grand, deaf inventor Edison holds forth to his acolytes, jokingly asking Tesla “Are you really from Transylvania? Have you ever eaten human flesh?”

Tesla marvels how Edison “talks to everyone” at the lab, from engineers to custodians, “but is incapable of listening.”

Self-conscious touches abound as we hit the high points, and lightly touch on the lows, of Tesla’s subsequent career. Do the flourishes add to our understanding of the man? Only Anna Morgan’s “Google search” suggestions.

Other than that, they seem either budgetary (all that rear projection instead of location shooting) or contrivances to make the picture “different” from “A Current War.”

In its best moments, “Tesla” holds its own with the earlier film. In too many others, third-choice casting in supporting roles and Hawke’s “closed-captioning” swallowing of his lines in the lead make “Tesla” an also-ran. Again.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic material and nude images

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Eve Hewson, Rebecca Dayan, Kyle MacLachlan and Jim Gaffigan.

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Almereyda. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42

Ariela is 16, looks 14, and is all about risk and rebellion.

We meet her (Shira Haas) as she’s recklessly riding, strapped to the roll bar of a fellow Israeli teen’s pickup. They roll up at a construction site rave, where she knocks back a few.

But 1130 turns her serious. She’s got to go home. NOW. Nobody’s leaving? That means she and her coochie-cutter shorts are walking to the nearest highway to hitchhike home.

Her Army officer dad (Yiftach Klein) isn’t fooled by her wardrobe change. Mom (Renana Raz) may cover for her, but he’s not buying that, either.

His barely-controlled fury about what happens “when men see you” on the streets, “half-naked, in the middle of the night” (in Hebrew, with English subtitles) leads to “punishment,” his idea of what will “nip it in the bud.”

He shreds her shirt and cuts the legs off the jeans she slipped into to cover up her transgression. She will stand, outside their apartment, on the street, all night in that get-up so that strangers will “compliment you on your promiscuity!”

“Broken Mirrors” is a domestic melodrama about guilt, ways to grapple with it or avoid dealing with it, and about the many forms and directions “punishment” can take.

Over-the-top touches and a big fat coincidence earn it the “melodrama” label. But it’s still a modestly gripping story of remorse mixed with revenge.

Because Ariela is headed for a fall. It comes when she sulks her permissive, just-wants-to-be-loved mother into letting her practice driving on a back road the next day. We sit and watch and watch for the shoe to drop, the hammer to fall, the car to jump forward, knock her mother down and put her in a coma.

Ariela gets her to the hospital, gets the stern “You’re already punishing yourself” lecture from her father, snaps that she will find a way to top that, and runs away. Guilt-ridden Ariela is hellbent on self-injury. And if getting raped, her father’s biggest fear, is the result, it’s worth it for the pain it will cause him.

Writer-directors Aviad Givon and Imri Matalon set up our expectations and sympathies, and then cut the legs right from under them in this tight chamber tragedy.

Whatever we feel about the fury that Ariela masks her guilt with, whatever fears we have for her safety with her every encounter with men, or as she marches into a literal field-of-traps, even empathetic teen viewers should be thinking “This is a bit much.”

“Why did you step in this area?” 20ish farmer Ben (Yoan Rotman) wants to know as he frees her from a leg-trap.

“Because the sign said NOT to!”

But father Giora’s authoritarian “actions have consequences” streak has origins that go beyond military discipline. That word we hear and read in opinion pieces in the U.S. — “projecting” — comes to mind.

Haas, a former Israeli child star, doesn’t play a lot of notes here. But Ariela’s scowl is so omnipresent that her attempts at turning “Lolita” come off as more than just clumsily childish. The character not only doesn’t know how to play “loose” to men. She is even worse at hiding her self-loathing and guilt.

And every minute that “Broken Mirrors” isn’t zeroing in on this confused, self-destructive kid Haas plays is a minute wasted.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations, profanity, teen binge drinking

Cast: Shira Haas, Yiftach Klein, Renana Raz and Yoav Rotman

Credits: Written and directed by Aviad Givon and Imri Matalon. A Level 33 release.

Running time: 1:39

Aug. 20, one week from today, brace yourself for a movie theater mob scene.

AMC is calling it “1920 prices” as a way of luring folks back into Cinemas.

One Twitter wag noted that “1918 prices” would have been “too on the nose.”

The US had its worst COVID day since May on Wednesday. So…one day, 15 cent movies, from a chain that lost over $500 million last quarter.

We are never going to tamp COVID down, thanks to morons following a traitorous nitwit right off a cliff.

https://apnews.com/a3794011d38591428c3a6e771d84977a

“The Driftless Area” is as good a representation of Anton Yelchin’s acting and role selection as you’re going to find. A mystical, moody and cryptic dramatic thriller with wry touches, it was “Indie” with capital “I,” so obscure as to earn very little theatrical release and almost no attention after his death, just after finishing it.

It plays like a film that came to life when some screenwriter (Tom Drury and director Zachary Sluser co-wrote it) noticed the geographical name of that corner of Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota that wasn’t flattened by glaciers — “driftless.”

The result is a story that drifts around in time, it’s narrative “present,” with characters that drift by or linger in the metaphysical. Yes, it’s willfully odd, but so arresting that you can see why an all-star lineup of indie-cinema favorites signed on for the ride.

Yelchin plays Pierre, a young man we meet as he hitchhikes into a mugging. The first sign that this won’t go well is that John Hawkes (“Winter’s Bone”) plays the pickup truck driving redneck who stops. The second is his instant demand for “gas money,” $20 just to take Pierre to the nearest garage so he can have his car towed and fixed. The third is when he stops the truck and mugs Pierre, stealing the rose bush (NOT a rose bush) Pierre is carrying with him.

But there’s justice in this universe. Pierre throws a rock at the creep as he drives off. Damned if he doesn’t crack the creep in the head, causing him to roll into a ditch, out cold. Pierre’s revenge is getting his rose bush back, tossing the dude’s keys away and stealing a backpack full of cash the chatty jerk bragged about before kicking Pierre out of the truck.

The story starts to fold back on itself as we see why Pierre bought the flowers, how they’re for this strange, romantic young woman (Zooey Deschanel) who walked naked away from a house that burned down around her, how Shane (Hawkes) set that fire and how he was put up to it by the evil rent-a-car crook Ned (Ciaran Hinds) and his minion (Aubrey Plaza).

Alia Shawkat plays Pierre’s pal, the sort of woman who says “This is what people talk about when they refer to ‘having a good time.”

That’s one of the quirky charms in play here, a sort of “driftless”drollery that has characters noting the obvious, that “It is what it is” is a meaningless, nonsensical expression that everybody picked up and abandoned a decade ago, confessing that “I just thought life would be fun. That was my impression.”

No. Not really. Even in non-“driftless areas.”

Deschanel took one last stab at playing the “quirky girl” before hitting 40. Stella meets Pierre when he falls into a well.

Him: “I think you saved my life.” Her: “I think you’re right.”

She has a protector/mentor (Frank Langella) who looks after her after the fire.

And everybody circles back around to the fictional present, where the brutish Shane hunts for his missing cash and revenge, Pierre’s aimless life takes on one big “purpose” and Aubrey Plaza gets to play one libidinous lowlife.

Good times.

“The Driftless Area” has a middling sense of place (What, no accents?), Several precious touches and a pall cast over it that comes from any movie Yelchin was in just before his Jeep killed him. There’s action and violence, and not much to the romance that’s set up here.

It’s watchable, but “Driftless” is more a movie that you like and appreciate than respect or feel challenged by. Color me shocked that neither the writer nor director has made a film since.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some drug use and violence

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Zooey Deschanel, Alia Shawkat, John Hawkes, Aubrey Plaza and Ciaran Hinds.

Credits: Directed by Zachary Sluser, script by Tom Drury, Zachary Sluser. A BRON Pictures film on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:35

“Around the Sun” is a simple, talky two-hander — just two actors, a lovely location, a little charm and lots and lots of words. 

It’s a courtship of the mind with dashes of wit, dollops of melodrama and drops of Jupiter mixed in. A screenplay with literary pretensions offers up mystery, period piece concerns with just a hint of sci-fi thrown in.

Not a lot happens, but the charming twosome draws you in and makes you invest in the story, obscurant touches notwithstanding.

“Sun” tells its tale in a series of repeated scenes, shifting points of view and intent, layers of misdirection peeled away with each telling.

“Location Scout” is how it begins. Bernard (Gethin Anthony) rolls up to this chateau in Normandy, eyes popping out at the image of a pregnancy test just emailed to him. Maggie (Cara Theobold) is waiting, a pert, pretty and pleasant estate agent, here to show him the property.

He’s rattled by the phone message. She prattles on about the property, long empty, but with one bit of glorious history.  The French essayist, scientist and philosopher Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle once stayed here. He is most remembered, she goes on with the barest hint of encouragement, for “Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds.”

Think nothing of the “coincidence” that Fontenelle and Bernard share the same first name.

The two of them tour the grounds, and as they are both young and good looking, we witness the most intimate conversation between a real estate agent and a film location scout in recorded history. As they are English, the “flirtation” is reserved, more implied than overt. And it’s her doing all the flirting.

She asks indirect questions about what is bothering him and they banter about something that’s more “ennui than malaise, not quite a joie de vivre.”

It takes on the tone of remembered “super-nerdy late night student chats,” all this stuff about life elsewhere in the universe, her “ex,” his seemingly pregnant wife.

“Is it just me, or doesn’t this feel really familiar?

Over 78 minutes we are treated to variations on this introductory conversation, changing perspectives, the nature of his work/reason for visit, more overt expression of her reasons for turning on the charm, laughing at his silly nothing of a joke. Once, they appear in 17th century garb, mimicking the dialogue Fontenelle set up in his “Conversations.”

Anthony, who did a season of “Game of Thrones” (Who didn’t?), is mainly a reactor here, someone who responds, in different ways in each of the different dialogues/chapters, to Maggie’s questions and revelations.

It is Theobold, who did a season of “Downton Abbey” (Who didn’t?), who piques our curiosity and maintains our interest. Maggie’s motives, her over-familiarity and her pressing on with the charm offensive, even after she spies that texted pregnancy test, raises an eyebrow even as we lean on that Fontenelle book to “explain” the story, the way it’s being told and what she’s really up to.

The roundabout, repetitious storytelling gimmick and lack of incident and drama won’t be to every taste. But “Around the Sun” is a perfectly engaging cinema essay on the lost art of conversation, the charm of romantic interrogation and the connection two people might find, in this universe or whatever alternative there might might that they’re willing to explore.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol

Cast: Cara Theobold, Gethin Anthony

Credits: Directed by Oliver Krimpas, script by Jonathan Kiefer. A Giant release on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime

Running time: 1:18

I love the way director Martín Hodara folds his flashbacks, seamlessly, into the fictive present in “Black Snow.” “Nieve Negra,” as it is titled in Spanish, is another polished, stark thriller from Argentina, and the feature directing debut from this career second-unit chief obviously knows his craft.

The worn and world-weary screen presence of Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in their Eyes,” “Truman”) has become as sure a guarantee of “quality” as any actor in the South American cinema.

The plot? That’s the weakest link in this frosty thriller about family tragedy, grudges and guilt.

Marcos (Leonardo Sbaraglia of “Pain and Glory”) and his pregnant wife Laura (Laia Costa of “Maine” and “Duck Butter”) have come to Argentina from Spain to settle his father’s affairs. The old man has died and there’s property to contend with.

“The Canadians” have made an offer for their land. But his estranged father has left a last request, that his ashes be buried with Juan, a brother whom we’ve seen killed in some sort of hunting incident in the prologue.

Thirty years have passed, and as unsettling as being back in these mountains is to Marcos, there’s nothing for it but to do as his father wished, especially since there’s a recalcitrant, reclusive brother (Darín) living in a cabin on that land, which is worth a lot of money if he can be talked into agreeing to sell it all.

“I thought we could have a coherent conversation,” he offers (in Spanish, with English subtitles). Salvador? He’s pointing a gun at him at the time.

The cabin and the sibling prompt flashbacks — sometimes in the form of dreams — about what really happened that winter hunt long ago. There’s a third sibling, a sister, in a mental institution and a newspaper clipping about “an avalanche” that tells Laura, and us, that what really happened was covered up. The only two people who know the truth are out here, in the wilderness, casting dark accusatory looks in each other’s direction.

Darín has the showiest role, a man wrecked by what happened long ago, embittered by it and not letting go of any grudge attached to it, especially against their father.

But the plot doesn’t deliver much in the line of mystery or suspense. The script, by Hodara and Leonel D’Agostino, has some twists, not all of which are strung out in the most cinematically effective manner.

“Black Snow” benefits most from its striking wintry setting, the ways this family’s sea of troubles seem anchored in that land and its secret and Darín’s brooding turn as a man who left civilization and family behind because he had his reasons, some of which we can guess, a few which arrive as a shock.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex

Cast: Leonardo Sbaraglia, Laia Costa, Ricardo Darín

Credits: Directed by Martín Hodara script by Leonel D’Agostino, Martín Hodara. A Direct TV production on Netflix.

Running time: 1:31

Say this for “Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies.” It’s thorough, almost academic textbook/video-accompanying-a-film-studies-class broad in its scope.

The documentary’s two hours and nine minutes take us from the first naked moving images of the human body to #MeToo, coming a lot closer to mentioning and showing a clip from EVERY movie that has ever had nudity in it than you might expect, or than is absolutely necessary. No, “Skin” doesn’t just dance through the hundreds of movies that the academics, historians, filmmakers, journalists and actors label as “groundbreaking,” or that moment when “the floodgates opened.”

Maybe that’s to be expected as Jim McBride appears in it and has a producing credit. The “senior entertainment editor” at the online film nude scene repository MrSkin.com is something of a completist, after all.

There’s marvelous, little-known history brought out, from “pre-code” to post-MPAA, “Extase” to “Henry & June,” “Magic Mike” and “American Pie.”

But the effect of this decade-by-decade, film after film having its plot summarized by a critic, a professor, an actress who appeared in it or the filmmaker, is muted by the excess.

Lost in the excess are actresses talking about “nudity riders” in contracts, nudity “required” in a film that producers and a studio want to reach a certain rating for pure business reasons, the not-really-nuanced difference between “essential nudity” and “exploitation,” the power imbalance that has ALWAYS put actresses in particular in the awful position of wondering, “Was it coercion, or consent?”

These matters are visited, right from the opening credits, a sort of CYA “permission” the filmmakers give themselves for their sometimes glib Survey of Skin on film. The differences between American attitudes and European ones on the subject are used to dismiss any thoughts of the exploitation that occasionally enters into the conversation.

When an actress talks about the eating disorder that hit her the minute she saw her naked self up on a theater screen for the first time, some editor or more enlightened producer might have said, “This is what our movie is about” because it’s certainly the most interesting thing in it.

When Sean Young mentions having to lift her shirt at the end of her audition for “No Way Out” for director Roger Donaldson, somebody — not just the viewer — should have cringed enough to say “We need to emphasize this more.”

And when an actress we’ve seen in “Skin,” time and again, explain away the decisions she made that painted her into a career corner — “She does nude scenes– finally adds “I didn’t have the choices women do today,” maybe rethinking this whole “survey” of skin in cinema as an organizing strategy should have entered somebody’s mind.

Because not every starlet could shrug it off with a carefree “When am I ever going to look this good again?”

As an overview, the blizzard of titles and parenthetical detours — into “nudie” and its subgenres, “women in prison” pictures, “stag films,” “art films” — could launch a hundred dissertations.

Great raconteurs Peter Bogdanovich, “Last Picture Show” director and film historian, and actor Malcolm McDowell (nude in “if…” and “Caligula,” a rapist in “A Clockwork Orange”) tell well-polished tales of this scene in that movie.

Landmark films in their treatment of nudity– many of them forgotten — are sampled, from the pre-Code silents to the competitors of Russ Meyer. We can laugh at the on-screen perversions that Cecil B. DeMille visited and revisited, and the ’50s and ’60s obsession with “nudist colony” set “nudies” (lampooned in “A Shot in the Dark”).

Then a wag jokes that “Last Tango in Paris” “certainly put butter on the map,” even as allegations that star Maria Schneider made about feeling “a little raped” on the set are downplayed and written off (by another male “expert” who looks about 30). And an actress tells us about learning how to read a script and a contract to ensure that you’re not “just the pair of (naked) boobs in that (film’s) distribution deal.”

McDowell sneering at the “hypocrisy” of Hollywood, the sexism that puts naked women on the screen exponentially more often than nude men, opens another can of worms “Skin” doesn’t fully address.

Any prurient value the film with “MrSkin” built into its bones has vaporizes in an instant. Let’s hope that’s by design, but the light touches that make a joke of Monroe’s openness and the “shock” of Julie Andrews losing her top in “S.O.B.” or the pointless inclusion of “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” suggest that it isn’t.

In setting out to do a complete history of on-screen skin, director Danny Wolf and the producers must have been bowled over by the access they got and the “names” they landed interviews with, all the titles they had permission to sample, and not been able to edit some of them out.

Perhaps a better approach might have been splitting this into a two or three film series, the way clips-heavy “cult films” and other histories of film genres or issues in the cinema have been dealt with. Entire episodes on “pre-Code” and “exploitation vs. ‘essential (necessary) nudity'” and the like would have streamlined “Skin,” and lessened the sense that ugly, important subtexts are given lip-service, and little more.

Because we know what the MrSkin crowd wants and will be streaming this for. “Thorough,” in this case, feels like pandering to the prurient.

MPAA Rating: NC-17

Cast: Shannon Elizabeth, Pam Grier, Malcolm McDowell, Mariel Hemingway, Martha Coolidge, Sean Young, Joe Dante, Peter Bogdanovich, Sylvia Miles, Amy Heckerling, Mamie Van Doren, Traci Lords and Eric Roberts.

Credits: Directed by Danny Wolf, script by Paul Fishbein and Danny Wolf. A Quiver release.

Running time: 2:09