Movie Nation

This is a real eye-popper. Literally.

June 17.

Whatever Netflix’s other troubles at the moment, the fact that the might-have-peaked streamer gave Polish director Mateusz Rakowicz his first feature film credit, and that it’s “The Getaway King,” stands them in good stead in my book.

A bracing, laugh-out-loud cap

er comedy/biography, it practically bounces off the screen, no matter what screen you’re watching it on. When you’re dropped into the middle of a nightclub for a Polish chanteuse’s enthusiastic cover of Kiki Dee’s “I’ve Got the Music in Me,” in Polish, “jaunty” is the only word that covers it.

“Getaway” is a fanciful “inspired by” account of the late career of a Warsaw Pact era Polish folk hero, thief and escape-from-police-custody wizard Zdzisław “Najmro” Najmrodzki.

Given a charismatic dash by a mustachioed Dawid Ogrodnik (“Ida,” “Oleg”) and sympathetically portrayed in a picture with slo-mo style and comic flair, we’re treated to the way the guy probably saw himself, as a swinging, beloved and hip “Robin Hood,” providing goods for “the people” when the Russian-dominated “state” failed them.

Najmro likes his double-breasted suits, fancy watches and sunglasses, and he likes to flash cash in Warsaw’s discos. Yes, it’s 1988, but the Eastern Bloc abandoned disco and double-breasted a bit later than the rest of us.

He’s famous for breaking into Pemex import stores and selling on their pricey wares to the locals. Everybody knows who he is. With his face plastered all over TV (a version of “Poland’s Most Wanted” is seen on the tube) who couldn’t? But they let him slide, even the ticket seller (Marta Wagrocka) he tries to sweet talk out of posters at the local cinema.

He needs the posters to cover the holes in the walls he and his crew (Jokobn Gierzal, Sandra Drzymalska, Andrzej Andrzejewski) create and crawl through for the heists. Terezka’s way of playing hard to get is to force Najmro to buy ten tickets to a movie nobody wants to see just to get his posters.

Could love be in the air?

“The Getaway King” doesn’t spend much time on robberies, although Najmro is credited as the guy who figured out the Achilles heel of stealable Euro-cars of the era. It’s more concerned with the capers Najmro deploys to bust out of jail. Because even though no one wants to turn him in, he gets caught — a lot. But give him his say in court and the speech will end with a tumble out an open window. Let him exercise in the prison yard and one moment he’s there, the next he’s vanished.

Twenty eight escapes says a lot about the state of communist Poland’s militia/state police. But this gruff cagey lieutenant (Robert Wieckiewicz) they’ve brought in from the provinces could change that, if his hapless assistant (Rafał Zawierucha) can stop screwing up long enough.

The film sets up a game of “tag” between crook and cop, with each “You’re IT” polished off with a punch, kick or head-butt.

Our chivalrous crook even lends a hand when their life-threatening Fiat-vs-Lada chase ends the way all such chases ended back then — in flames.

By not dwelling on the crimes, the movie shortchanges us on the wit and wisdom of our master thief, who instructs his crew that there are “four types of clients,” the sort of greedy folks who buy stolen sunglasses, watches or cars — “The professor (a knowitall),” “the pushover (pretends he’s a professor),” “the negotiator…just wants to put on a show” and “the looker,” who may not buy without coercion.

But that doesn’t deprive us of the fun of the time travel (Poland’s pre-Soviet collapse 1980s looked a lot like the mid-’70s here) the good natured hustling by the crooks, and the dogged police work by that one militiaman who may have this guy’s number.

Whatever other cutbacks you make, Netflix, keep a little mad money around to make sure Rakowicz and his crew are still on the payroll. In Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English, “The Getaway King” is a thoroughly charming rogue packed into a perfectly entertaining caper comedy.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, gunplay, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Dawid Ogrodnik, Robert Wieckiewicz, Marta Wagrocka, Rafał Zawierucha, Jokobn Gierzal, Sandra Drzymalska, Andrzej Andrzejewski and Dorata Kolak.

Credits: Directed by Mateusz Rakowicz, scripted by Łukasz M. Maciejewski and Mateusz Rakowicz. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

What’s the trailer tell us?

“I’ve inherited a villa in the South of France.”

“Someone’s making a movie…at DOWNTON?”

When a sitcom produced either of those plot twists, we’d use the phrase “jumped the shark” back in days of yore.

But with Maggie Smith leading us into a Victorian Era flashback (if she’s supposed to be young, and “Downton” began with WWI) and a great estate coping with the challenges of The Great Depression or right around there, this could be delicious.

“A New Era” comes to theaters May 20.

A beautiful woman alone in her expensive home, a husband always tied up with business, a handsome gardener who sure would like to “cool off” in her inviting pool. And by the way, he’s got this…partner.

Sounds like a porn pitch, right? So tried and true it could be from the ’60s.

“Private Property” wears this odd, out of its era mantle for a good reason. It’s based on a fairly notorious 1960 psychosexual thriller that featured the young character-actor/legend in the making Warren Oates.

Writer-director Chadd Harbold’s attempt to update a film that was salacious for its time manages to maintain some of the menace in that scenario, but he and his cast fail to make the voyeurism and sexual tension that the original film is known for seem anything other than quaint.

In telling the story out of order — “The Day Before,” etc. — this version becomes all about plot twists and back story and less about the lust-triangle dynamic that gave it tension, danger and notoriety in its day.

Ashley Benson of “Spring Breakers” is Kathryn Carlisle, a Laurel Canyon “actress, sort of…trying to be…aspiring.”

Married to a producer (Jay Pharaoh) who makes no effort to further her career as he tends to his, she spends her days in the comfort of luxury. One suspects that she cleans her own house out of guilt, to remind her of the devil’s bargain she made to get this life and how it isn’t working out.

She does her laps in the pool and chats with her Jorge the gardener, alone with her thoughts unless she’s nagging her agent for a role, or recording a sordid confessional scene for a video audition.

But a call tells her Jorge is “no longer” with her service. His replacement (Shiloh Fernandez, last seen in “The Birthday Cake”) seems eager to please. He talks a very good game.

“I want my clientele to treat me as a valued collaborator on their home,” a “landscape architect.”

Kathryn tries to rebuff this over-familiarity. But the handsome stranger does her a solid when he picks the lock to let her back into the house she’s locked herself out of. Next thing we know, he’s asking for a dip in her pool and she agrees.

Her condescending “a regular Renaissance man” crack at his “rapper” ambitions mean she’s blown right by his suggestive “I’m pretty good at most physical stuff” innuendo. But his snappish pride keeps her off balance and eager to mollify.

She doesn’t know this guy isn’t a gardener. She hasn’t guessed that he’s broken in next door. Even after she meets her “new neighbor” (Logan Miller) in the company of her new gardener, she can’t piece together the threat or recognize that she’s been targeted.

Fernandez ably pulls off the “yeah, I’ve been in jail” tough that this guy Duke is supposed to be. In “day before” or “two days before” flashbacks, we totally buy him intimidating a store owner out of drinks and pulling a switchblade on a tech guy (Frank Whaley) driving a vintage Buick Electra convertible.

But their best efforts aside, there’s not enough in the film to make me buy into the whole Duke and Oates — the real-names of the guys stalking Kathryn — dynamic, the prison-hardened lady killer lording over the creepy virginal simpleton under his thumb.

Benson, attired in bikinis, short shorts and the like, is presented as a sexual temptation/object of desire/target. But there’s little chemistry between this lonely, spoiled woman and a guy easy to identify as underclass trouble. Yes, she’s talking bluntly about a sexual encounter in a bar restroom in her opening narration. That’s an audition, right? The walk on the wild side seems not part of her makeup or even a personal fantasy, just something she says to the camera.

Without the heat their rising temperatures are supposed to generate, “Private Property” struggles to find its footing and never escapes the feeling that we’re watching something out of date. Sex or sexual assault, both earn a demure treatment here. Little is done with the class conflict, the “movie business” tie-in is an awkward afterthought.

And in making this all about the plot, “revealed” in flashbacks, when the key weapon is clumsily and obviously foreshadowed in the opening scene makes this “Private Property” fail long before closing.

Rating: Rated R for some violence, language and sexual references

Cast: Ashley Benson, Shiloh Fernandez, Logan Miller, Jay Pharaoh and Frank Whaley.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chadd Harbold, based on the 1960 film written by Leslie Stevens. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:28

This Sundance entry has a serious fizz about it. This Red Bandish trailer has three or four good giggles in it. Dining in America ” comes our way May 27.

A doomsday conspiracy thriller with Hopkins directing his “team” to save the day, from beyond the grave?

Not a big name in the supporting cast. But just the sort of movie you can make in a pandemic. Self quarantined.

Could be could good. May 27 we’ll see.

A somewhat frazzled turn by Christina Ricci and the ambition to try a big third act plot twist are the chief recommendations of “Monstrous,” a 1950s horror tale about a mother trying to save her son from something not wholly unlike the Babadook.

That’s where this Chris Siverston (“I Know Who Killed Me”) thriller seems to be taking us — a child sure there’s a “monster” outside his window, the supernatural allure of this “beautiful lady” he saw in the spooky pond out back, his mother trying to start a new life in a new town with a new job when this “Monstrous” Swamp Thing happens to her kid.

When Laura stops telling Cody (Santino Barnard) it was “just a nightmare,” she finds herself yanked underwater while sitting on the sofa, diving into the pond to pull her kid out, or facing down the monster with a knife.

The creepy bits — water flowing into the house, under doors, menacing mother and child — and the jolts don’t muster up the terror of “The Babadook,” sort of a genre-defining take on this mother-child set-up. But shortly after we give up on that direction ever bearing fruit, that “twist” appears and changes the reality of what’s going on and the meaning of the picture, even as it leaves things less tidy and even less satisfying than the opening acts.

Ricci’s Laura, dolled up in the dirndl dresses of the day — prim and proper and permed — is on the lam with seven year-old-boy Cody. They’ve fled Mesa, Arizona and Laura’s soon-to-be-ex, moving into a remote rented farmhouse in the brownscape that is drought-stricken Southern California.

The ex calls their new number, rattling Laura. Her mother, like other ’50s mothers, doesn’t see the harm. Laura’s moved on and fearful. Still, she’s got a job as a typist for an insurance firm. Cody’s started at a new school.

Then the weirdness begins. The kid is transfixed by the lake, and prone to night terrors. There are water issues in the house that play into the nightmares. The landlord’s assurance that it’s “probably a raccoon” comforts no one.

Quick! Call a Catholic church! But mention “I think we have a demon” and they hang up on you.

Screenwriter Carol Chrest’s (“The Prophet’s Game”) story dithers between the horrific and the unpleasant but mundane. Is Cody being bullied? Will anybody come to his birthday party?

And who is this “beautiful lady” he keeps talking about down at the pond?

Ricci gives us a little paranoia and barely enough panic to engage us in her plight. She’s good, but the performance has an element of “hold something back for the third act” about it.

The film has clues here and there, which don’t really add up to the big upend-the-story turn it takes.

The jeopardy is built-into the situation, but the frights feel low-stakes and simply don’t get the scary job done. And then the movie becomes something else, something not wholly unexpected and something not necessarily more interesting than the stumbling supernatural kid-in-peril tale that “Monstrous” makes us think it is going to be.

Rating: PG-13 for terror, thematic elements and brief violence

Cast: Christina Ricci, Santino Barnard, Don Durrell and Colleen Camp

Credits: Directed by Chris Siverston, scripted by Carol Chrest. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:28

“Mau” is a documentary about the Canadian thinker, futurist and designer Bruce Mau, a man who wants to make the world realize “your life is a designed life.” And if the design of that life, this profession, that cultural practice or this “system” — labor, transportation, housing, environmental stewardship, government, etc. — isn’t working, there’s no reason to despair.

“We can redesign it. We have the capacity to change the world.”

If that sounds like the world’s most optimistic TED Talk, well that’s a fair label. “Mau” is mostly Mau talking, in fresh interviews and archival news reports, with others in his orbit singing his praises, and a collection of long anecdotes of how he was handed big problems that he was able to synthesize into an idea that might fit on a button.

“Think forever. Design for perpetuity.” “Break through the noise.” “Compete with Beauty.” “Your responsibility (as a designer) is to inspire people.”

Mau, who “designed” his life to get out of an abusive home in the Canadian mining town of Sudbury in northern Ontario and become one of the world’s most influential Big Thinkers, is often tagged as a great communicator, and a “naive utopian.”

But over the decades, if your soft drink company (Coca-Cola) wanted to rethink its business and rebrand itself as “sustainable,” if your government wanted to end the chaotic crowding that occasionally leads to Hajj stampedes and mass death at Mecca, if your country wanted to shed its past and bring back “the ability to dream,” Mister Outside-the-Box has been who you call.

“Cynicism is for others,” he preaches. He’s started a short-term school he named The Institute Without Boundaries.” He tried to get civil war-torn Guatemala to think of itself as “Guate! Amala!” so that the populace could look to the future with hope. And when asked to come up with a “10 year plan” to lessen traffic issues at the most sacred site in Islam, he proposed a “1000 Year Plan” that would get pilgrims into the country, and spread them over a string of redesigned entrances to the city in a way that would alleviate dangerous crowding no matter what mode of transport the future holds.

Mau’s “Massive Change” design show of 2005-6 pushed big ideas at big problems. And his “Massive Action” follow-up, planned for China a couple of years back, would look for ways to empower everyone to make a positive impact on the world’s most alarming problems — climate change and “sustainability” topping that list.

That’s a through line of the film, that Mau’s best pitches — like the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and others who think about the future — aren’t adopted, and that a lot of these initiatives can look like failures.

Saudi Arabia and the Islamic world bristled at the idea of a Kingdom-hired Canadian having anything to do with Mecca. China canceled the big “Massive Action” exhibition due to a freeze in Chinese-Canadian relations.

The barrel-chested Mau has had health scares forcing him to “redesign” the way he feeds, rests and exercises his body.

But giving up on any of these isn’t in his makeup or his philosophy. When you’re “challenging the old narrative,” there’s going to be pushback. Some people in Guatemala like the never-ending civil strife, or are threatened by any outsider commissioned to do what they can’t.

The idea — win, lose or gradually changing direction, is to focus “net positive design” in life, community, career and climate, to make a start and stick with it.

The film doesn’t do the best job of visualizing Mau’s ideas. We can see what he planned for Mecca, but other concepts and pitches are simply not as cinematic. “Mau” plays like most TED Talks. “Performance” only takes not-quite-concrete concepts so far.

Journalistic cynicism demands that one notice that PET soft drink bottles still cover the planet on land and sea, that the big problems only seem to grow thanks to a culture distracted not just by “Lady Gaga” and the doom-and-gloom evening news that Mau complains about, but by existential threats Mau and this film do not address — the global assault on democracy, the reverse of his “Free Women” platform for “Massive Change” that is happening even in the industrialized West.

But “Mau,” which tells a short version of the designer’s life story and early triumphs, dwells mostly on his ongoing crusade, accentuating the positive. The man insists that as we’ve designed these messes, we can design our way out of them.

Call him a Pollyanna if you like. This might be the hardest time in recent history to hear and listen to someone like him. But “Mau” has the audacity to suggest it could be the perfect time, as well.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Bruce Mau, Paola Antonelli, Bisi Williams, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Bjarke Ingels

Credits: Directed by Benjamin Bergmann and Jono Bergmann. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:17

The thriller “Thar” is a reminder that Sergio Leone’s Westerns can be adapted to any setting, and that nepotism isn’t just a Hollywood thing.

“Thar” is a plodding desert borderland tale of drugs, murder and revenge, decorated with gunplay, gruesome torture and sex. There are horses, sure. But in this 1985 story they’re supplanted mostly by jeeps and motorbikes. The desert setting is the one separating India from Pakistan that gives the film its title.

And we have to label this a “Western” because the police procedural touches in this “case” are a shrugged-off afterthought.

It opens with a furtive night of illicit sex between a young woman about to be married off and the lover she’ll be leaving behind in remote Munabao, passion interrupted when her family is robbed and slaughtered.

No, she can’t identify the attackers.

Then a goatherd is killed outside of Munabao, a town so dry even the weeds have trouble staying alive. But Suva wasn’t just murdered. An ear was sliced off and he was gutted and left hanging from a tree.

“Someone was sending a message,” the grizzled narrator/police inspector Surekha (Anil Kapoor) mutters (in Hindi, or dubbed into English).

Surekha is about to retire from this sleepy, low-crime posting. But now he and his plump lower-caste lieutenant (Satish Kaushik) have real crimes and government officials who want the perpetrators identified “and everybody killed” to “close the book” on this case.

Just local “dacoits,” Indian bandits settling a score? Drug dealers from across the border in Pakistan? A local feud? And who is this nearly-silent stranger ( Harshvardhan Kapoor, son of Anil), asking around about men he wants to hire for “a job” moving “antiques?” He’s spending a little too much time questioning the wife (Fatima Sana Shaikh) of one of the men he wants, the locals think, seeing as how that husband is out of town.

Somebody “knows” something about some of this, or all of it. But nobody talks.

“A different breed of vulture is circling our Munabao.”

Director and co-writer Raj Singh Chaudhary parks his archetypes in a desert setting, and takes his sweet time pointing this picture towards the obvious conclusions he knows we’ll draw. He doesn’t develop the blind alleys for the slow-footed cops to pursue. We spend little time with the drug lord (Rahul Singh) and the armed horsemen who might be responsible for all this.

No, let’s only focus on the mysterious stranger, his motives and actions. Not that the cops zero in on the guy nobody knows.

The sadistic violence that breaks out from time to time is practically on another timeline. His sidekick may call Detective Inspector Surekha a “genius,” but there’s precious little here to back that up. He has hunches but barely bothers to collect evidence. He leaps to conclusions while missing the obvious.

Kapoor, a chiseled icon of Indian cinema, plays this guy with a glib growl, a ready-to-retire cop “excited” about his job, at long last, blithely ignoring the body count piling up on his watch. Give him Raybans and he could be David Caruso, a cop just waiting for the next opportunity to drop a tasty one-liner, although there aren’t many of those.

His son’s character, Siddharth, is so thinly sketched-in as to barely amount to an archetype. We see his actions, but nothing about the character gives away emotion and begs for our investment in him. The script is much more concerned with filling the third act with his motivations for doing what he’s doing. That doesn’t help Kapoor the younger show us anything other than his smoldering good looks.

The few jeep chases and shootouts are almost on a par with action pictures from anywhere. The gunplay isn’t that convincing and the pacing even in the most exciting moments is leisurely.

And the inclusion of sex scenes show more Western influence on Indian cinema, at least on movies made for Netflix.

But “Thar” never quite gets up the head of steam that a generic thriller whose ending is pre-ordained needs to pass muster. When we know where it’s going, extra effort has to be made to distract us until that moment we get there.

People are disappearing and dying gruesome deaths and there’s zero urgency in the heroes, the villains, the bystanders and officialdom) to do much about it.

And the occasional attempt at creating an iconic Leone-style Western image never overcomes the “shot quick” and “filmed digitally” handicaps that keep the striking settings of “Thar” from taking on the sheen of a “Once Upon a Time in India.”

Rating: TV-MA, torture, gun violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Anil Kapoor, Harshvardhan Kapoor, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Jitendra Joshi and Satish Kaushik

Credits: Directed by Raj Singh Chaudhary,  scripted by Raj Singh Chaudhary and Anurag Kashyap. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:48

Kino Lorber picked this film festival darling up for June 3 release.

Striking and unlike anything else “out there?” Oh yes.