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Getting the French to admit “Journey to Greenland” was inspired by the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon “The Trip” mockumentaries might be as difficult as filming this series turned into a movie. Because, you know, they filmed it in GREENLAND.

Pair up a couple of comic actors named Thomas — Thomas Scimeca, recently seen in “La Belle Epoch”, and Thomas Blanchard, one of the players in the absurdly quirky “Mandibles” — find an excuse to put them on a chopper to remote Kullorsuaq, an Inuit community on the icy coast, and see if something funny turns up.

It’s a deadpan “fish out of water” comedy that has a script but rarely seems like it. Perhaps writer-director Sébastien Betbeder gave them more of a Coogan/Brydon outline.

“Thomas, your father moved to Greenland. And Thomas, you play his struggling actor friend, so you tag along.”

What ensues is are some seriously deadpan takes on Greenlandish life, just enough back story to show how the two-guys-named-Thomas met (an improv class in which they questioned and irritated the teacher, then walked out of together), and let the cultures clash.

Tall Thomas (Blanchard) wants to be introduced to Miss Kullorsuaq, who is quite cute but a bit young for the scruffy, 30something failed-actor.

But, but…”I am in a period very conducive to falling in love!”

Short Thomas, visiting the father who gave up his life, career, marriage and perhaps some parenting responsibilities to stay in Greenland after a visit years ago, marvels at being in a land of the Midnight Sun.

“The sun is shining all the time,” he notes (in French, with English subtitles), and looking at every house in the village, including the one he’s trying to sleep in, his father’s. “Not a shutter in sight.”

The guys jog on the ice floes, with the locals wondering (in Inuit) “Why are those guys always in such a hurry?”

They check out a local rock band, try a few local delicacies, and pick up on how hard lives are there, the loss every family has faced at one point or another. They dabble in ice fishing and find themselves on a seal hunt and its gruesome aftermath. Here, try an eyeball.

“You’ll taste the lens,” father Nathan (François Chattot) coaxes. “Not bad.”

There’s a little melodrama, a couple of flashbacks to their lives back in France (a botched take on a movie set) that hint there’s more comedy to be found there, and plenty of reminders of how easy their lives are when compared to the ones they’re dropping in on.

And at every point — the failed womanizing, the “fine dining” (raw seal liver), the sight seeing (ice, more ice) — they seem to send up the various “Trip” movies that Coogan, Brydon and Michael Winterbottom turned out.

“Journey” isn’t a laugh riot, but there are enough quirky grins and giggles that you can almost feel the structure of the three half-hour (or so) TV episodes aired back in 2015 that were edited together to make this film.

Rating: unrated, graphic animal slaughter scenes

Cast: Thomas Scimeca, Thomas Blanchard, François Chattot, Ole Eliassen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sébastien Betbeder. A UFO release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

Marin Alsop was the only child of two accomplished freelance classical musicians — a violinist and cellist — who gigged all around New York during her childhood. They’re the ones who signed her up for piano lessons as a tyke, and sent her to violin camp when she was older.

She grew up watching Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated “Young People’s Concerts,” not from the provinces on Saturday morning TV, but from the hall where “He talked directly to me” in between pieces played by the New York Philharmonic.

Alsop started at Juilliard at 7, attended Yale, founded her own 14 piece string “swing” ensemble, String Fever, and later got a backer to help her launch the Concordia Orchestra.

Later in life, she was personally mentored by the charismatic and hugely-influential Bernstein.

Every step of the way, she gained media attention, write-ups in the New York Times, feature coverage on New York TV and even network TV.

And STILL nobody wanted to give her a crack at her lifelong stream, to be a conductor and music director of a symphony orchestra. She remembers every time she heard “women can’t do that” and “no.” She’s held onto every rejection letter from college conducting programs.

“The Conductor” is an engaging, musically-adept documentary that tracks Marin Alsop’s dogged march to make her “first woman to head a major symphony orchestra” dream come true, taking on that job at the Baltimore Symphony, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and until 2020, with the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo.

Bernadette Wegenstein’s film doesn’t just show us the family photos, early video and later footage of Bernstein’s “hugging, attacking” and effusive instruction and encouragement of Alsop on the podium. And it doesn’t just hit the highlights of her rise to the top — skipping many of the waypoints of her orchestral journey. “The Conductor” shows her mentoring, remote teaching, working with young women and men as she helps train those who will take the baton from her.

We see Alsop rehearsing and leading orchestras through the classical music warhorses — Beethoven and Dvořák, Mahler and Mozart. And we see her drilling students in “playing” the group of sometimes 100 musicians, mastering the gestures, the timing and the posture that a conductor needs to generate the sound that is just notes on a page until a conductor and ensemble interpret it.

On the podium, with her mop of hair flipping hither and yon, her face a mask of beatific intensity, she can’t help but bring to mind Bernstein’s soulful theatricality.

Think of what you’re told about “confronting a bear,” she tells her students. The idea? Make yourself as BIG as possible.

The point of it all is that being one of the first and for most of her career the “only” woman in such a prominent position in classical music — the 2018 bio-pic “The Conductor” is about Antonia Brico, who conducted major orchestras from the 1930s onward, but who never took on the role of music director at a major American symphony — Alsop is doing her damnedest to make it easier for women who follow her.

“The Conductor” doesn’t just document her efforts in this regard, it amplifies them.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Marin Alsop, Michael Cooper, Tim Smith, and Leonard Bernstein

Credits: Directed by Bernadette Wegenstein. A Cargo release.

Running time: 1:30

“Munich: The Edge of War” is a moderately suspenseful piece of historical revisionism, a thriller that dangles an intriguing “What if” in its fresh take on the shameful Munich Agreement, which delayed but did not prevent World War II.

Handsomely-mounted and well-acted, never quite lapsing into melodrama if never quite breaking from formula, it’s too narrow in focus and too shallow a gloss on the subject to placate historians. But it’s worth taking in just for its novel views of Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler and the accord that became historical shorthand for “appeasement.”

The story begins, as any tale of World War and Cold War intrigues must, at Oxford in the early ’30s, and climaxes at the actual Munich conference, where Britain and France signed over a corner of Czechoslovakia to forestall a threatened German invasion in 1938.

George MacKay (“1917”) is Hugh Legat, who graduates from Oxford to join the foreign service and become one of the private secretaries of Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, given gravitas, wariness and a much deeper voice by casting Jeremy Irons in the role.

Jannis Niewöhner (“Je Suis Karl”) is Paul von Hartmann, the idealistic classmate who drunkenly extolls the promise of “The New Germany” in 1932, but who finds himself alarmed enough to have joined “deep state” resisters to “this madman” by 1938, He works as a translator in the foreign ministry, someone a bit over-awed when he finally meets Hitler (Ulrich Matthes) in the crisis leading up to the conference.

Legat has worn the “distant” label von Hartmann gave him at university, which puts his marriage (Jessica Brown Findlay) on thin ice long before he gets the “one’s family has to take a back seat” lecture from his Foreign Office boss as the crisis begins.

Von Hartmann’s idealism has been replaced by vain “hope” and promises that the German Army will intervene if Hitler pushes them into war just 20 years after the last one ruined Germany. “Hope,” von Hartmann now believes, is futile, this notion that “somebody (else) will do something” to prevent a catastrophe.

It’s a remark that stings today, magnified by the historical distance, resonant in other crises. It’s more seriously addressed here than in the glib “The King’s Man,” this idea that history might be changed and this or that ideal or state can be saved by one rash act, an assassination when all the “debates” and political maneuvering has failed. “Munich” reminds us that changing history like that takes more than desperation and “wishing someone” would do it, and that when the chips are down, few are capable of it.

A “falling out” between the two college friends must be ignored as back-channel word travels to Hugh that Paul might be reaching out with some information that could sway Chamberlain into acting differently. If only both of them can get to Munich.

The tropes of such “What if” tales, indeed of espionage movies in general, are clearly spelled out in the Robert Harris novel this is based on. German director Chrisian Schwochow (“Je Suis Karl”) and screenwriter Ben Power (TV’s “The Hollow Crown”) don’t avoid them, but make them land lightly enough.

The leads are quite good, even if their characters are thinly-developed and the big moments of suspense and action few and far between.

What’s fascinating to anyone casually acquainted with this era and this particular event is how the principal figures in it are portrayed. “Downfall” veteran Matthes makes his Hitler a precursor to the “final days” Hitler Bruno Ganz gave us in that landmark film. There’s a hint of paranoia, a seething distrust of “educated” members of the German gentry like von Hartmann. But the politician is very much in evidence in this Hitler, a sober valuing of any new face that might give him something beyond the moronic “yes men” he has surrounded himself with.

He is dangerous, sinister even in revealing what we’d call today his “superpower” — “I read people” (these passages are in German with English subtitles). Hitler can’t decide if he wants to frighten or charm von Hartmann, and he’s obsessed with how his actions play in the press, at home or abroad.

Irons’ Chamberlain is fixated on public opinion, a man “too old to have fought” in the Great War, confiding every now and then with Legat, who was “too young” to have served. Chamberlain’s narrow focus — preventing a repeat of the mass slaughter of just 20 years before — seems rational and understandable. History has shifted from the simplistic “appeasement” label for the give-away Chamberlain signed at Munich, with the phrase “he bought us time” to prepare for the coming conflagration.

“The Edge of War” bends over backwards even further, making Chamberlain aware of how history will treat him, aware that he is “playing poker with a gangster.”

“As long as war has not begun, there is hope that it may be prevented!”

All that’s interesting enough to the armchair historian. But the stumbling block of many a “What if” story from World War II is easily evident in “The Edge of War.” For all the talk of the inevitable worst case scenario, the stakes feel awfully low. The narrow focus mean we see the graffiti on storefronts and humiliations and “Emigrate to Jerusalem” taunts aimed at Germany’s Jews.

Just a scene or two suggest the alarm in Britain about the consequences of failed talks — barrage balloons inflating to rise over London, gas mask public service announcements painted onto sidewalks, Hugh’s little boy trying his on as his wife resists being evacuated.

Legat’s functionary is the only one who bemoans the fact that the Czechs are the only ones not given a seat at the table that decides their fate.

Consequences are something for the near future, not September of 1938. That renders “The Edge of War” somewhat bloodless.

The film still manages to be a beautifully-detailed recreation of a well-worn piece of history, most thought-provoking in its novel approach to the motivations and intent of those involved.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, smoking and brief violence

Cast: George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner, Jessica Brown Findlay, Sandra Hüller, Ulrich Matthes and Jeremy Irons

Credits: Directed by Christian Schwochow, scripted by Ben Power, based on the novel by Robert Harris. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

Yo ho hos served up in half hour doses this March?

I smirked at a few of the cameos in this trailer — Fred A. and Leslie J., Taika plays Blackbeard without an Ocracoke accent.

Hey, anything with pirates can’t help but amuse, right?

It’s pitched as an Argentine “Waking Ned Divine,” and one can certainly see a couple of similarities between that beloved comedy and “The Finger (El Dedo).”

There’s a death that could play a key role in the future of a village, if and when word of it gets out. The dead guy was a local character, somewhat beloved.

But the deaths aren’t the same, the local response to that demise is quirky, and the entire affair is more convoluted in the South American tale and handled in a sort of aimlessness that somewhat robs “The Finger” of its point.

This “true story” comedy is as distinctly Argentine as any picture in recent memory, a movie charmingly disorienting in tone thanks to that whole “Feels like Italy, with Italians speaking Spanish” vibe Argentina gives off.

 
In 1983, sleepy Cerro Colorado is on the verge of greatness just as Argentina is on the verge of democracy — again. A birth has given the village a population of 501, qualifying it for an election, a “mayor” who will represent it, and other signs of “progress.

Yes, people still get around on horseback. Mostly. Only the chauffeur-driven Don Hidalgo (Gabriel Goity) has a car. He seems seriously worked-up over this “town” news. Because being the richest guy in town, landed gentry going back generations, he will of course stand for election and maintain the control his family’s had over the place forever.

The others might shrug that off as noblesse oblige and what not, but the increasingly eccentric Baldomero (Martín Seefeld) just might raise some objection. Which is why Don Hidalgo tries to enlist him as his “campaign” lieutenant. Oddly enough, Baldomero turns up dead, stabbed and left lying in a creek bed.

This one-store, one-church, one-priest, a lone “no letters today (in Spanish with English subtitles)” postman, one-real-policeman village that wants to become a town has both a crime and an ethical dilemma on its hands. Who did it, and why? And can we keep that a secret until after the election, being “civic minded” and all?

The guy who won’t let this go is Florencio (Fabián Vena), proprietor of the Casi Todos Ramos Generales, “Almost Everything General Store.” Baldomero may have been off his nut, but he was Florencio’s brother. When Florencio and a friend retrieve the sibling’s body, Florencio chops off one of the dead man’s fingers and makes a vow of what he’s going to do to the killer, and where he’s planning on jamming that finger.

Director Sergio Teubal, whose directing career seems to have ended with this 2011 film, tries to weave together the disparate threads of this story, the various agendas in play, with mixed success.

The finger is dropped into a jar of formaldehyde on the counter of the store, and people start “consulting” it, making decisions based on which direction it floats into. The finger could help with the investigation, or at the very least, lead a “loyal opposition” to the free-spending, influence-peddling Don Hidalgo.

Don Hidalgo and his vote-fixing shenanigans must be thwarted. Florencio must confront the killer. The police chief must turn a blind eye. And the finger must keep its secret from anyone who would let the news out that it belongs to the guy whose death dragged Cerro Colorado back down to a population of 500 living souls.

Teubal, working from a Carina Catelli script — she has “Noche Americana” coming out this year — loses track of where to go with all this even as he’s layering in plenty of local color and dollops of quirky.

There’s a French hiker who doesn’t speak Spanish and can’t seem to find his way out of town. Either he “just missed” the weekly bus, or the bus doesn’t stop.

A Greek chorus of old timers — male and female — sit on a bench in front of the sheet they use to project movies in the Town without TV and mock themselves in commentaries to the camera, ridiculin, the idea of a movie being made of what happened here, who “the guy playing me” is, all of it.

“There’s no hell like a small town,” one confesses, and the movie backs up that point. As charming as any country’s “quaint” and “picturesque” villages are, as tempting as it might be to “Escape to the Country,” living amongst the entrenched locals is almost sure to be arduous.

Teubal gets so many things right that tthe drifting, meandering film that tells this story is never so far adrift that it loses its New World-Old World Italian/Spanish charm. The Old World Spanish/Italian violence, political mischief and blood oaths play as just quaint enough to be “cute.” But not so cute that you’d ever want to live here, no matter which direction The Finger points you.

Rating: Unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Fabián Vena, Martín Seefeld, Gabriel Goity, Rolly Serrano and Mara Santhuco.

Credits: Directed by Sergio Teubal, scripted by Carina Catelli. A Film Rise/Tubi/Mubi/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:33

One thing you could never accuse Michael Winterbottom of is sentimentalism. The British director of “Welcome to Sarejevo,” “24 Hour Party People,” “A Mighty Heart,” and those hilarious “The Trip” movies with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon specializes in dramas of unadorned, harsh truth and comedies just dripping with cynicism.

His period pieces show us a past of stark beauty, difficult lives where the ugliness isn’t hidden behind Empire waistlines, stunning scenery and “quaint” romanticized mores and struggles to get by.

“Jude,” his adaptation of the last novel of Thomas Hardy, is an unblinking plunge into Victorian prudishness, selfishness, hypocrisy and classism — postcard pretty people and settings filled with the ugliness of animal slaughter, the bloodiness of childbirth and the harsh realities Dickens saw and somewhat sugar-coated, but not Hardy. It’s very obviously the work of the filmmaker who stripped the romance of the Alaskan Gold Rush in “The Claim” and mocked the oversexed and unsanitary world of the rogue “Tristram Shandy.”

The author of “Far from the Madding Crowd,” “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” “The Return of the Native” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” finished his long form fiction career with a story of a farm lad who aspires to a life of letters, and the obstacles he either discards — an inappropriate marriage — or cannot surmount as he pursues it and the free spirit who settles down to a life of shame, struggle and tragedy as he loses his way.

Biographers see a hint of Hardy’s own life in “Jude.” Winterbottom saw a blunt condemnation of Victorianism and all but marches through the story, often in quick lurches, to get it all into this, one of his earliest films.

A black and white prologue captures the primitive world young Jude Fawley is born into and makes little attempt to reconcile himself with from the start. A beloved teacher (Liam Cunningham) departs, and points to distant Christminster (Oxford) as his destination, to study languages and literature and live a more lofty life. That becomes the orphaned working class lad’s goal.

Future Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston plays Jude as a young man, absorbed in books, deep into his Latin and Greek and longing to make the journey his mentor made. But the saucy, sexy Arabella (Rachel Griffiths) gets in the way. Nothing like lobbing a pig’s heart into his lap to break up his brookside idyll and tease Jude into literal rolls in the hay.

Aunt Drusilla (June Whitfield), who raised him, should probably have made this point before the untimely union.

“Frawleys are not cut-out for marriage.”

Jude figures that out when he flees to that aunt after a particularly gruesome bit of business Arabella has to handle almost single-handed, butchering a pig. The wife figures out the mismatch and announces she’s leaving for Australia to start over. Jude drifts away to Christminster and plots his entry to university while working as a stone mason.

The rigid hierarchy rejects his application to move up in class by attending university. But as consolation, he meets the orphaned cousin he never knew, Sue Bridehead. As she’s played by Kate Winslet, he’s hopelessly smitten and willing to ignore his fellow masons’ “What’s the law saying about marrying cousins?” jabs.

But does she share his ardor?

Like a lot of filmmakers faced with a novel of daunting length and dense texture, Winterbottom makes a deft waltz through the early chapters of this life journey only to, by necessity, jump and skip and stumble through the later ones.

Eccleston makes a more sturdy than stirring lead, whose best moment may be a tipsy recitation, in Latin, before students and stone masons drinking in a public house. Who eggs him on? Why, it’s another “future Doctor Who,” the sparkling David Tennant in a bit part. Eccleston doesn’t bring pathos to the morbid moments even as there’s plenty of heat and infatuation to the frankly sexual ones.

Griffiths all but devours him in their shared scenes.

But Winslet’s arrival as Sue marks the picture’s true beginning, and her “bright girl” turn — smoking, convention-defying, witty and atheistic — simply dazzles Jude and us even as the story settles into its long, tragic descent.

I’ve never met a Winterbottom film I didn’t like, and this Hossein Amini (“Driver”) adaptation is never less than engrossing. To maintain its stately, purposeful pace, the picture’s later acts should have been longer, although considering the harsh content, that might have been unbearable.

And in the cold light of day with the unsentimental passage of time, I dare say the director, BBC Films and even Eccleston might agree that there was a serious charisma gap in the casting that turning to the other future “Doctor” on the set might have solved.

Rating: R for strong sexuality and intense depictions of death and birth

Cast: Christopher Eccleston, Kate Winslet, Rachel Griffiths, Liam Cunningham, June Whitfield, James Nesbitt and David Tennant.

Credits: Directed by Michael Winterbottom, scripted by Hossein Amini, based on the novel “Jude the Obscure” by Thomas Hardy. A Gramercy/BBC release on Amazon, Roku, Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 2:03

Clint Bentley’s debut feature film is an elegiac tribute to the lonely, dangerous and tenuous life of a jockey. Filmed in “magic hour” glow, with almost every scene a beautifully backlit postcard, “Jockey” makes a fine star vehicle for one of the finest character actors working today, Clifton Collins, Jr.

Collins, who first gained notice in “Capote” and has made the filmic worlds of scores of films more credible (“Sunshine Cleaning” in particular) simply by virtue of his unfussy, understated, mostly working-class performances.

Collins plays Jackson Silva, a 50something, high-mileage jockey winding down his riding days in Phoenix. He’s got a trainer (Molly Parker, perfectly-cast) he gets on with, a core of fellow jockeys he respects and even likes.

But the end is closer than he’d like to think, and any hopes he has of riding trainer Ruth’s new pride-and-job filly to glory might not just depend on him “making weight.” He’s also got to consider how long he puts off going to a real doctor, and not the “horse doctor” who takes x-rays, shakes his head and listens for explanation of the “damage” he sees — three broken back injuries, for starters.

Jackson isn’t the first in his family to ride, and in when he finally has a chat with this new rider who seems to turn up at every track where he works, Jackson realizes he might not be the last. Gabe (Moises Arias of “King of Staten Island”) finally admits that he’s his son, not that Jackson acknowledges that.

“Jockey” is about that dance around accepting the kid and accepting the inevitable, a sentimental melodrama about a rider in winter taking stock of what his life has amounted to and may yet amount to, if his various long shots pay out.

Jackson talks up Gabe for a job by praising his “light hands” at the reins. That’s also the perfect phrase to describe Collins as an actor. Ruth asks Jackson about her horse the first time he takes her for a test-ride.

“She’s like a swan with teeth.” Collins lands that description so lightly it almost slips by you, the elegance he endows it with is that understated. “Been waiting a long time for a horse like this” could have been left unstated, but as it’s in the script, Collins treads easily over that, too.

I’m often struck by the ways Collin neatly settles into whatever milieu his character’s supposed to inhabit. Park him in a scene with real jockeys, and he does exactly what he needs to in order to not stand out as “the actor” in their midst. Collins and Bentley cede a chunk of this film’s heart to another even-more battered rider, “Leo.” He’s given a lovely pathos by jockey and ex-con Logan Cormier.

Collins just sits in a hospital room set as Cormier gives us the “not afraid of dyin’, afraid of not bein’ able to ride” speech, a scene of simple mourning carried off by men too proud to let us see the grief.

When he wasn’t nagging his director of photography (Adolpho Veloso) to make sure this diner booth, that trailer kitchen, stable stall or moment by the rail at Phoenix’s Turf Paradise track is framed in a backlit glow, Bentley mostly stays out of the way of his actors and lets the good things happen.

This is an auspicious debut, another horses and the men broken by riding them story that makes a fine companion piece to Chloe Zhao’s pre-“Nomadland” classic, “The Rider,” about a crippled rodeo rider.

In a just world, there’d be awards attention for Collins’ latest perfectly-modulated performance. Even if there isn’t, it’s a grand thing when you give somebody who always gives the “star” credibility, merely by his or her presence in support, a moment in the spotlight. What’s even grander is what Collins does with it.

Rating: R, language (profanity)

Cast: Clifton Collins, Jr., Molly Parker, Logan Cormier and Moises Arias.

Credits: Directed by Clint Bentley, scripted by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:34

Justice in a controlling, secretive, theocratic oligarchy can be a slippery thing, and is every bit as fraught as one fears in “Photocopier,” a tightrope-walking thriller from Indonesia.

It’s a film that gives an almost nodding assent to the Muslim country’s assorted moral edicts about alcohol and sex, all while eviscerating the corrupt patriarchy that enforces them.

It’s about a young computer sciences student who strays from the straight and narrow, pays a terrible price for her “transgressions,” and gets in over her head when she tries to figure out how she was “pranked” and “exposed” as a drunk on social media.

All Sur (Shenina Cinnamon) wanted to do was to celebrate with the daring and boundary-pushing theater troupe, Mata Hari, whose website and social media presence she manages as decoration for her resume. Mata Hari’s dance-theater production of “Medusa” won a major award and is bound for a Pan Asian competition in Kyoto, and Sur was a big part of that success.

But Sur, after promising her lazy, bullying Muslim father “no alcohol,” after also promising her photocopy shop pal Amin (Chicco Kurniawan) that they’d leave the wrap party for “Medusa” early, gets caught up in drinking games and general hedonism with the thespians, depicted here as only pretty rowdy, if a lot less transgressive than such ensembles in the West.

The next morning, she’s bawled out by her father (Lukman Sardi) and all but crucified by her scholarship committee, showing up in the same clothes she partied in the night before. The proof is in the incriminating selfies that reveal her lack of “character.”

Sur protests her innocence (in Indonesian with subtitles, or dubbed into English). But the truth is, she was blacked-out drunk. She doesn’t remember getting home, or who brought her. There are gaps in the evening and the “selfies” posted from her phone have technical issues a computer-and-social-media savvy 20something like her would spot.

Kicked out of her house, she moves in with childhood pal Amin over his seedy off-campus copying shop and begins her investigation.

Was she sabotaged? Might the saboteur be the former Mata Hari photographer (Lutesha) who sneered at her, in warning, before she went to the cast party? Could the chain-smoking, sketchy Amin be involved?

Or was it someone from that party, someone with a grudge or some other agenda she can’t put her finger on? If only she could scan their phones.

Indonesian films I’ve sampled in my travels “Around the World with Netflix” generally play out at a slower pace than Western cinema, which is a problem you can’t really dismiss as simple “cultural differences” when you’re making a thriller. That said, director and co-writer Wregas Bhanuteja’s “Photocopier” had me riveted to the “investigation,” the ticking-clock tension of hacking this phone or uncovering that clue in this paranoid thriller.

As you can guess from the movie’s title, one of the culprits in Sur’s undoing might be the piece of tech she screenshots, photographs and videos “evidence” on. Her phone isn’t necessarily her friend. The tech that can track and re-create a ride-share’s route, or summon a world of germane facts (last night’s weather) to your fingertips can also be used for control.

Sur is down a rabbit hole without even realizing it, under the thumb of institutions that no one questions, from university panels and cyber crime police to the omni-present fumigators spraying neighborhoods, as they announce on loudspeakers, to kill mosquitoes and stop a “dengue fever” outbreak.

“Photocopier” doesn’t do the best job of suggesting “Sur’s paranoid and just imagining this conspiracy,” a standard ingredient in thrillers of this type since before “Gaslight” became international shorthand.

But Bhanuteja and his cast immerse us and Sur in multiple worlds she must investigate and keep under suspicion — the cultish “creative” and rule-bending free-spirits of the theater, the hidebound university and those who know hot to bend those rules, and the crypto-fascist state that she may have to rely on for “justice” if she ever figures out what that “Photocopier” might want to tell her.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual situations, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Shenina Cinnamon, Chicco Kurniawan, Dea Panendra, Jerome Kurnia, Giulio Parengkuan and Lutesha.

Credits: Directed by Wregas Bhanuteja, scripted by Wregas Bhanuteja and Henricus Pria. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:08

When it comes to breakout feature films, heart, spirit and novelty, aka “freshness” trumps almost everything else.

Show us a world that most of us have had no entre to, populate it with colorful characters and try to err on the side of “sweet” and a whole lot of sins can be brushed over in the viewing.

“The Fabulous Filipino Brothers” is in the spirit of “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads,” the Indian-American “ABCD,” the Koreans-in-LA “Gook,” the Native American “Smoke Signals” or Latino LA’s “Real Women Have Curves.”

The acting ranges from broad to amateurish. The dialogue and plotting is often on the clumsy side. And there’s a narrow point of view to it that flirts with piggish male wish fulfilment fantasy more than once. But it’s almost sure to leave you with a grin and a new appreciation for another culture introduced via cinema.

Veteran bit player turned director and co-writer Dante Brasco gives us a “Brothers McMullen” version of his life with his siblings, an exaggerated and amusing view of the dynamics of a “typical” sprawling, striving Filipino-American family delivered in an uneven but winning film.

He also co-stars in the film, as “Duke,” the “lucky” brother with a high-paying job, an Anglo wife and teen crush he never got over whom he “luckily” runs into on his first visit to the Philippines. Well, “lucky” for him, anyway.

But Dante wisely makes this one of the shorter episodes in this five part “This is what our lives are like” depiction of this Pittsburg (“The one without the ‘h’.”) California brood.

Derek Brasco plays Dayo, “like the Harry Belafonte song,” the eldest, a rotund hustler who takes on responsibilities because he sees their first-generation immigrant parents getting older and it’s expected of him. In the film’s opening episode, Dayo stumbles and skips through ways to raise the funds to pay for a big family wedding, hilariously tumbling into delivering a rooster to a cockfight, with his granny as a reluctant sidekick.

No, we don’t see the cockfight, or the poker game that was Dayo’s first idea for financing this new obligation. He’s mainly here to react and “explain” this culture, lecturing his pragmatic Chinese-American wife (Cheryl Tsai) about the difference between “my people” and “other Asians.

“We’re JUNGLE Asians,” perhaps the most thought-provoking label in the film.

Most of the explaining here is done in voice-over by the four brothers’ sister, Dores (co-writer Arianna Basco). Filipinos “love karaoke, the cha-cha and gambling,” she declares. The brothers? They’re “the reliable one, the funny one, the lucky one and the dark one.” “Fabulous Filipino Brothers” lets us see how each lives up or down to that label.

The family scenes bubble over with life, even as the occasional performer in them makes us think “This is the first time he/she has ever been in front of a camera,” even as the dialogue has the odd ESL-level clinker line.

The brothers are mostly just “types” who embody their labels, but their stories are distinct and delightful in their own ways. “The funny one,””little brother” David (Dionysio Brasco) seems aimless, a spoiled slacker/stoner. But he is catnip to the ladies, and we’re treated not just to his laugh-out-loud seduction dance with an interested would-be partner at the dinner buffet, but his flippant intervention in the problems of “The Dark One” (Darion Basco). Danny, the “broken” second-oldest brother, is a guy who never got over being jilted two years before and who has lost himself in brooding solitude (in the big extended family house), composing moody electronic music to mask the pain.

The quartet has great chemistry, and if the script is seriously sexist, it at least has the good manners to acknowledge that in Dora’s voice-over and belated third act appearance in their tale.

And there’s a glorious flippancy to all this, an acceptance of being “different” but also being a mash-up of various Asian and North American cultures in their California guise — yakuza, Triad jokes, lots of wisecracks about their native language, Tagalog, which none of the brothers, or any of their generational peers, mastered.

“Hey, I don’t SPEAK Manny Pacquiao!”

All these disparate boons, bonuses and bungles combine to make “The Fabulous Filipino Brothers” a film that transcends it failings and becomes not just funny and warm enough to work, but a cultural touchstone, a movie well worth dropping in on if you enjoyed any of other “cultures among us” comedies that preceded it.

Rating: unrated, profanity, drugs, sexual situations

Cast: Dante Brasco, Derek Brasco, Dionysio Brasco, Darion Brasco and Ariana Brasco

Credits: Directed by Dante Brasco, scripted by Arianna Brasco, Darion Brasco and Dante Brasco. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:38



Nobody sets out to make cinematic pablum as bland as “The Royal Treatment.” Then again, as there are entire TV channels devoted to edge-free “meet a prince” female wish-fulfillment fare, maybe they do.

Apparently, Netflix is getting into that business as well.

A movie with dull leads, scripted by a veteran of second tier sitcoms and helmed by an even less promising director, it started life flavorless and nobody added even a hint of spice along the way.

Two supporting players, acting as if they’ve got nothing to lose so they might as well have some fun, steal the picture without even trying. Not that there’s much to steal.

“Royal” is a Laura Marano star vehicle, and the onetime child starlet (“Austin & Ally”) dials up the “perky” as Izzy, a very Italian New Yorker who runs the struggling family hair salon and charms everybody in her corner of 183rd St. (The Bronx?) as she does.

One day, a misdial from visiting royalty sees her summoned to give a haircut to the guy the newspapers are calling “The Hot Prince” (Mena Massoud, who starred in the live-action “Aladdin”). Izzy’s feistiness intrigues him. As he’s about to marry, and the little European principality where he lives needs some sassy New York stylists to primp one and all for the wedding, Izzy and her garish pals Lola and Destiny are off to Lavonia to bedazzle every Euro-stiff within reach.

Naturally, Izzy finds herself coming between the prince and his rich, airheaded Texas intended (Phoenix Connolly). But even that potential conflict is smothered in the crib as this Holly Hester script just has no room for conflict — you know, the stuff DRAMA is made of.

I’d quote clever snippets of dialogue, but there aren’t any. I’d plug the performances, but the leads are as colorless as they are pretty. Even the standard-issue “snippy” royal valet (Cameron Rhodes) is rendered less interesting than the vapid character “type” he’s meant to be.

The one corner of “Treatment” where things threaten to spark to life is in the war of wills between the French-accented palace wedding planner (Sonia Gray) and Izzy’s two colorful hair and makeup pals (Grace Bentley-Tsibuah, Chelsie Preston Crayford). They have the voices, the wardrobe and the brass to make even the most exhausted “MAKE-over!” scene pop, just a little.

Everything else in “The Royal Treatment” is as tedious and common as all involved could make it.

Rating: TV-G

Cast: Laura Marano, Mena Massoud, Grace Bentley-Tsibuah, Chelsie Preston Crayford, Sonia Gray and Cameron Rhodes.

Credits: Directed by Rick Jacobson, scripted by Holly Hester. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:36