Movie Nation

Get past the dull first act…and somewhat dull second. See beyond the attempts at arty-fartiness — extreme close-ups and blurred montages of images — and the cheap shocks and “Alone With You” kind of/sort of works.

It winds up in ever-heightening paranoia and finishes with a bloody flourish.

This is an “unstuck in time” at-least-in-her-mind tale of a model/makeup artist (Emily Bennett, who also co-wrote and co-directed this) who becomes trapped in her Brooklyn flat, panicking as she awaits the return of her overdue photographer/lover.

Charlene, aka “Charlie,” experiences joyous impatience, then worry, jealousy and fear of betrayal before her paranoia has her hearing this, “seeing” that and flashing back to clues from the relationship she’s so desperately into.

Simone (Emma Myles) was an on out-of-town shoot, and is due back. Right now. Charlene remembers when she was Simone’s favorite subject, practically her only subject. They’d pose-and-snap away on a deserted, out-of-season beach, with the viewer seeing what Simone saw through the viewfinder — LOVE.

Now? Well, getting calls from her hard-partying pal Thea (Dora Madison) in the club doesn’t help. Thea plants seeds of doubt, a lot of “I warned you” and “I’ve BEEN warning you” suggestions, because Charlie is “waiting” on Simone yet again.

“You wait on her like it’s your f—ing JOB!”

And even though she’s spilled wine in the tub and on the carpet, let’s assume Charlie got a few belts back over the course of the evening. Talking with her shrill, disapproving mother (horror mainstay Barbara Crampton) would drive anybody to drink.

But Facetime with Mumsy throws Charlie a curve she didn’t see coming. “Wait, what TIME is it there?”

Mom’s got a sunny widow behind her, Charlie’s in the dark–in the same time zone.

Then she starts hearing the thumps and bumps, the weeping through the heating vents in between apartments. Is there somebody IN here with her?

And those manikins Simone draped sheets over downstairs aren’t doing much for Charlie’s frazzled state either.

Bennett, a bit player on TV and in films, wrote herself a fine “cracking up” showcase, and she doesn’t disappoint — much.

The obscurant script features far too many “posing” sequences, far more “establish the setting and the set-up” scenes than are necessary. And runway-ready or not, Bennett doesn’t do enough to animate those static early acts.

But she comes to pieces with the best of them. Crampton would be proud.

The payoff doesn’t totally makeup for the longueurs that introduce “Alone With You.” But there’s promise enough and the picture’s short enough that it’s not a total waste of time, or waste of a lot of time.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Emily Bennett, Barbara Crampton, Dora Madison, Emma Myles

Credits: Scripted and directed by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:22

Her diary showed Anne Frank in human dimensions, a “normal” teenage girl of the Europe of her era — fascinated by celebrities, sex, interested in boys, sometimes petty, devoted to her dad, a little less fond of her mother.

Her decades as an international icon, the most famous Holocaust victim of them all, have clouded over that. “My Best Friend Anne Frank,” a new Dutch film based on the life of Israeli Holocaust survivor Hannah Goslar-Pick, gives a martyr her humanity back.

Goslar-Pick was a German-Dutch neighbor who grew up with Anne and was even transported to the same camp complex where Anne and her sister Margot died — Bergen-Belsen.

“My Best Friend” remembers the playful, rebellious and occasional mean girl that Anne was in a somewhat staid but well-acted film about Anne’s last years.

This Dutch film follows two timelines, capturing the nervous but relatively happy times the two schoolmates/playmates spent in Occupied Amsterdam in the summer of 1942, just before the Frank family slipped away to hide in their famous “annex” until they were exposed and arrested by the Germans and their Dutch collaborators. The person who most likely gave them away was identified just last month.

And we follow “Haneli” (Josephine Arendsen) through the winter of 1945, a teen still taking care of her baby sister, still listening to her father (Roeland Fernhout), who used to promise that he’d obtain the passports that would get the family out of German Occupied Europe, who now promises they’re due to be “exchanged” for German POWs any day now.

Hannah remembers herself as shy, praised for her singing voice, but inexperienced about all the “sex” stuff that interested Anne. Even though Hannah claims to want to be a nurse, “like Florence Nightingale,” she recoils every time Anne brings up human reproduction — or tries to shock her with illustrations from a medical text.

But Anne has schooled Hannah in a different way to approach life, to literally ask “What would Anne do?” (in Dutch, with subtitles, or dubbed into English). That’s how they slip into the cinema, watching a German propaganda newsreel and (apparently) “The White Angel,” a 1936 film about Florence Nightingale, from behind the screen.

Jews “aren’t allowed to use the phone, aren’t allowed into the cinema” Anne parrots. She is bold enough to flirt with boys, brazen enough to let one sneak them into the movies, and given to pranks — some of which strike her fragile friend as quite cruel.

Nearly three years later, Hannah tells her baby sister that Anne is “is on the other side of the (thatch-covered) fence,” in the deadlier work camp next door to the “exchange camp” Hannah, Gabi and her father are in. “What would Anne do?” is how she rescues Gabi’s stuffed bunny, and how she resolves to make contact, late at night, calling through that thatched fence to strangers on the other side. She’s looking for her best friend, Anne.

“She is probably the most talkative among you.”

I like the elegant parallel structure screenwriters Marian Batavier and Paul Ruven came up with for this. We’re sweat out the ticking clock of Allied “liberation” in the came, and we’re allowed to count-down towards Anne’s family’s planned “escape,” with Anne just as in the dark about it as Hannah.

But Hannah hears their fathers talking, and there are other clues about what’s coming. The German thuggery, matched by that of Dutch police hoping to impress their masters (and save their own skins) we see at every turn reminds of the stakes and the urgency of Otto Frank’s (Stefan de Walle) “annex” plans.

The life-inside-the-camp scenes are where the pathos of this story lies, although the main focus is on how Hannah took Anne’s bravery to heart to help her sister, stand up to her father and to the Hungarian Jewish women who dominated her barracks at Bergen-Belsen.

The story is admittedly fictionalized, according to an opening credit. And the viewer is required to trust that this or that particular important detail really happened. Goslar-Pick is not the only person to claim Anne Frank as “best friend.” Someone named Jacqueline Van Maarsen published a memoir under that label some years back.

But that’s not as important as what this story does for Anne. It celebrates her as exceptional, someone a friend would want to emulate when it came to bravery and making the best of an awful situation. And it gives back this soulful, deep thinker and memoirist her adolescence, staring in the night sky at “the Little Bear” (Ursa Minor), dreaming of the places she’ll go with her bestie when all of this is over.

With Nazis all over the Western world lured back out from the rocks they’ve been hiding under for decades, Anne and her friends — fellow victims and survivors — should have a voice in whether we tolerate that.

Cast: Josephine Arendsen, Aiko Beemsterboer

Credits: Directed by Ben Sombogaart, scripted by Marian Batavier and Paul Ruven. A DFW production for Netflix.

Running time: 1:43

This looks terrific, intrigues involving Israeli occupation security forces getting Palestinians to rat on each other

March 4, from IFC.

Bill Cosby was an artist who “changed the world,” “America’s Dad,” an icon of stand-up comedy, a breakthrough TV performer with Emmys and Grammys and national recognition in every field he moved into.

He was a tireless education activist in front of the camera, and a behind-the-scenes activist who not just broke barriers, he opened doors for others — forcing the integration of the film and TV stunt-performer industry.

And “He was a rapist who had a really big TV show once.”

Comic-turned-filmmaker W. Kamau Bell’s “We Need to Talk About Cosby” is a cultural history lesson, a work of biography, and in the tradition of “Surviving R. Kelly” and “Allen v. Farrow,” an expose of a famous person whose private persona can only be described as monstrous. For decades, the most famous Black entertainer in America drugged and raped women — scores upon scores of them.

Bell’s four-part Showtime series unfolds as biography, marking the Philadelphian’s early years, his showbiz breakthrough as an emulator of comic pioneer Dick Gregory who found the way to success and riches in America was to become “Raceless Bill,” with “family friendly” stand-up. His don’t-talk-about-race credo saw him rewarded with multiple TV series that were landmarks of their time.

But all the way through this Showtime series, in every episode as Cosby launches his career, first tastes fame, and then reinvents himself again and again, there were victims and pieces of evidence that kept coming out, a sexual predator “telling us who he was” on stage, on TV shows and in interviews. The signs were there, Bell shows us and Cosby-watchers and others tell us, suggestions of criminal activity and the attitudes that led to it, the “rape culture” that only #MeToo put into the public eye.

His story became the most precipitous fall in American public life.

Bell interviews victims, co-workers, academics, entertainment historians, psychotherapists, lawyers, journalists, the researcher/curator of “Hamilton’s Pharmacopia,” an expert on “drug facilitated sexual assault,” and shell-shocked fans.

The series firmly places Cosby at the pinnacle in the history of American comedy, and as a Black role model whose omni-present face and voice made him an icon of generations. And Bell asks the hardest question, one that comes up whenever Roman Polanski, Michael Jackson, Picasso or Woody Allen’s names are mentioned.

“Can you separate the art from the artist, and should you?”

“Talk About Cosby” is rich in detail and thorough in the breadth of interviews Bell conducted. The generous sampling of TV and film appearances includes not just samples of Cosby the performer, but cringe-worthy interviews with Larry King, clips of Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer “reporting” on a story that should have made them blush.

There’s a tsunami of facts, achievements often lost with the passage of time — a CBS TV special Cosby hosted, “Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed,” that presents what’s been criticized as “uncomfortable” “critical race theory” way back in 1968.

Every episode is filled with achievements and the acclaim and respect that every bad thing Cosby ever did took away from him. And every episode has little clues, hints that maybe “Doctor” Cosby’s Ed.D. wasn’t earned, other signs — his infamous stage routines about “date rape drugs” like Spanish Fly — that maybe the public and African America in general shouldn’t have kept him on that pedestal for so long. The series makes it clear how easy Cosby made it for us to assume his midlife “America’s Dad” guise was just a reflection of his real life.

The first hint that he might not be what he’s seemed was his evolving into Black America’s public scold. That made his “hypocrisy” an easier target when the whispers turned into court cases.

Bell hands interview subjects a notebook PC that to play back incriminating stage routines, interview revelations and even a damning episode of “The Cosby Show” in which he leers about his special “people, they get all huggy-buggy” after sampling his special barbecue sauce. Bell questions interviewees about what “Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable’s” Cosby-selected profession was on “The Cosby Show” — an OB-GYN. His office?

“It was in the basement of their townhouse…Ohhhhhh.”

His manner of manipulation, of using his “power,” is explored. He “mentored” some of his victims, especially when he had the most popular TV show in America. Some of Cosby’s enablers are named, the “serial philanderer” label is examined and the phrase “a LOT of people knew” pops up.

And there are endless, repetitious accounts of how this power figure at the top of the entertainment industry would lure powerless women, offer them drugs or sneak those drugs into their drinks, then heartlessly shame the women with “you got so drunk” and “This was between you and me” threats the morning after.

The series’ thoroughness and the repetition of the predator’s modus operandi can make the outrage feel earnest but somehow muted, with Bell speaking for many in how deflating and disheartening learning all this has been. Despite the many interviews with victims, there are fewer big emotional punches in this series than you’d expect, given the life-altering nature of the crimes.

“Talk About Cosby” is missing an interview with the pivotal figure who brought Cosby down — the outspoken stand-up comic Hannibal Buress — who may want to move on from that October 2014 club appearance, but whose absence is felt. That’s where some of the outrage that the series is missing might have come from.

But by generously sampling Cosby’s greatest hits, by praising Cosby’s philanthropy, Bell masterfully builds us up in between damning indictments. He reminds us of the “monument to Black excellence” that was “The Cosby Show,” its cast and even its set, and of Cosby’s place at the center of American culture. Remembering how high the man rose, how trusted he and his “brand” became makes his fall more disheartening, the reluctance to believe his accusers and the whispers easier to understand.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic discussion of rape, profanity

Cast: Bill Cosby, Gloria Hendry, Lili Bernard, Victoria Valentino, Michael Jai White, Jemele Hill, Michael Dennis, Jelani Cobb, Gloria Hendry, Gloria Allred, Doug E. Doug, Linda Kirkpatrick, Lise-Lotte Lublin, Michael Coard, Rolando Martin, W. Kamau Bell

Credits Written, directed and narrated by W. Kamau Bell. A Showtime release premiering Feb. 6.

Running time: Four episodes @:58 minutes each.

This one comes to theaters Feb. 4, Friday, and streams/downloads/VODs Feb. 8.

David Blue Garcia directs this reference the old/chainsaw in the new reboot/sequel.

Great cell phone “cancel culture” joke.

Check it out. Feb. 18, Leatherface is reborn on Netflix.

When it comes to gumshoe cinema, I have a pretty high tolerance for the cornucopia of cliches that are the bread of butter of of the genre. “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “Rogue’s Gallery,” anything based on a Raymond Chandler novel or sending up “Chandleresque” and I’m in, at least for a while.

“Last Looks” is such a film, but one with baggage that may not have even crossed the mind of TV and film screenwriter Howard Michael Gould (“Cybil,” “Home Improvement,” “The Jeff Foxworthy Show,” “Mr. 3000”) when he wrote the novel that he later turned into a screenplay.

It’s an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink dramedy about a disgraced cop reluctantly-recruited to clear a TV star, a plummy-voiced Master Thespian who is A) foreign, B) a “black-out drunk” and C) accused of murdering his wife.

It stars Charlie Hunnam as a dropped-out/off-the-grid, hipster survivalist beardo who works the case from the seat of an ’80s vintage 10-speed bicycle. But when you cast Hollywood’s most celebrated anti-Semite as actor Alastair Pinch, when you let him drop lines like “It was good enough for Wacko Jacko (pedophile Michael Jackson),” when you immerse our gumshoe in the murderous “the star always gets off” corruption of “the Sh–ty of Angels,” what are you really saying about co-star Mel Gibson?

That makes the picture a form of moral relativism that probably wasn’t the intent of Gould, certainly not of journeyman TV and film director (“Brockmire,” “Veep”) Tim Kirkby. “Last Looks” invites you to ask yourself, “In light of everything ELSE we know about Hollywood, is ol’Mel all that bad?”

Gibson makes a lark out of the entire experience, all Van Dyke beard and ever-so-British twinkle, with every Received Pronunciation syllable rolling off his tongue like The Great Barrymore or the Greater Olivier at his vampiest.

He is glib. He is flip. Alastair drinks on the set of his popular TV show, “Johnny’s Bench,” which has him dropping the dipsomaniacal Brit act to sling an Oklahoma accent. He is all “I was drinking absinthe” when he decided that this was the night he’d “teach Stevie Wonder how to drive” anecdotes.

Alastair doesn’t seem like the sort who’d murder his wife. Then again, he doesn’t seem the least bit upset that this has happened, that their little girl (“America’s Got Talent” also-ran Sophie Tatu) is motherless.

Former star LAPD detective Charlie Waldo has to be dragged out of his recluse-in-the-mountains (Banning, California) life, limiting himself to “100 things” as his possessions, living off the land and meditating with a pet chicken in his Airstream . He was tempted by his ex (Morena Baccarin of “Deadpool”), threatened by a cop (Clancy Brown), generic thugs and a newly-made marijuana tycoon (Jacob Scipio). And still ou’d have to wonder why he’d take this case.

But all Alastair has to say is “What SAY you, detective?” in that accent, and our bearded anti-hero is on board. Sort of.

The plot is a tangle of storylines, alternate suspects, femme fatales and dead-end subplots which add up to little that isn’t obvious or that makes much sense.

The supporting cast has its stand-outs. Throw in Rupert Friend (“The Young Victoria”) as the oily, multi-tasking network chief, Robin Givens as his take-no-prisoners legal mouthpiece, Lucy Fry playing a runway-ready kindergarten teacher, with a cameo by Method Man and a glorified cameo by Dominic Monaghan as a seedy lawyer.

The entire concoction never amounts to much, but Hunnam makes an agreeable fictional detective stereotype thanks to his scruffy look, his ability to shrug off the many beatings such characters endure and Charlie’s “car with character” (that ten-speed).

But that brings us back to Gibson, who was Twitter-trending just last week as assorted folk noted that if “The Jews run the world/media/Hollywood” as anti-Semitic America (and the deranged Brit who took all those hostages in Texas) seem to think, “Why haven’t they/we canceled Mel Gibson?”

While the movies might be B-pictures, by and large, Gibson’s still working. “Last Looks” is no “Boss Level” or “Fatman,” and isn’t as high-minded as “The Professor and the Madman.” Not that any of them were all that. He has six movies in the can prepping for release, three movies and a TV series in production or pre-production.

A big chunk of the movie-going audience pays him no mind, but plenty of fans never quit on him, here and abroad.

So here’s what we can conclude about “Cancel Culture” when it comes to popular conversative figures caught being bigots. There IS no cancel culture. Gibson works a lot, just never in anything all that good, rarely in anything that could be called an “A picture,” rarely with a co-starring cast of any repute and rarely in a movie that earns much attention, or deserves it.

Whatever his baggage may bring in terms of name-recognition for your film, we read “What is this movie REALLY saying about/doing-for Mel Gibson” every single time out. His notoriety is sentencing him, every movie he makes and everybody who chooses to work with him — in front of or behind the camera — to movie purgatory.

Which is all “Last Looks” deserves.

Rating: R for pervasive “language” (profanity)…and violence

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Lucy Fry, Morena Baccarin, Dominic Monaghan, Robin Givens, Clancy Brown, Jacob Scipio, Method Man, Rupert Friend and Mel Gibson

Credits: Directed by Tim Kirkby, scripted by Howard Michael Gould, based on his novel. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:50

One can almost see the wheels turning in the ancient and esteemed British production company, The Rank Organization, the interoffice muttering that leads to inter-office memos and then to major — or minor — motion pictures.

“Oy! What’s this? United Artists has a big, fat hit on its hands with ‘The African Queen?’ What have we got the rights to, that story that predates the (C.S. Forester) novel that one came from?”

That would be “The Beachcomber (The Vessel of Wrath),” which had already been made into a British film back in 1938. Somerset Maugham published the story, about a tipsy but sturdy man of the tropics named “The Honorable Ted,” and the sparks he set off with the willful and pious spinster missionary lady — a teetotaler — and their life-and-death “tests” in the “uncivilized” world, back in 1931.

Forester’s novel about a jungle river adventure involving a tipsy but sturdy riverboat skipper of the tropics named Charlie Allnutt, and the willful and pious spinster missionary — also a teetotaler — was published in 1935.

No, they’re not the same. But…

The most famous version of “The Beachcomber” starred Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester. But the 1954 version, with Robert Newton, Glynis Johns and others, was in glorious Technicolor, reason enough to check it out whilst scrolling the “classics” menu of assorted streamers.

It’s dated, sexist, racially patronizing and downright cringe-worthy at times. But one of the few British women directors of the day was behind the camera. And where else can you find a future Bond villain and “Halloween” hero in blackface?

Donald Sinden plays Gray, the aristocratic young man sent to be the new “Resident,” the crown’s governor, on a Raj-era island somewhere in the Indian Ocean (Sri Lanka, then called “Ceylon,” was where the exteriors were filmed). He is warned that his predecessor in the job “shot himself.” But it’s too late to turn back now.

Gray meets his head clerk, Tromp (Donald Pleasance, the first Anglo actor in blackface here, and not the last), and the priggish local pastor (Paul Rogers) and medical man, and his equally priggish sister (Glynis Johns).

Gray barks out orders in that pidgin English so popular during The Raj, or at least in movies about The Raj. And he hears his first words of warning about the only other countryman on this island of Barru, “The Honorable Ted.” It isn’t long before the tatty, tipsy Ted (Newton, the definitive “Long John Silver”) makes his introductions.

After a meal with the missionaries, who “take only water,” Ted figures Grey needs “a proper welcome from the white population” of the place. He proceeds to drink the man’s liquor, confess that he earns the family stipend “by staying out of England,” and make an offer that “any time you feel like a little bit of fun” to the young, crisp-uniformed bureaucrat.

Before you can say “Pip pip” Ted is stirring up pith-helmeted officialdom with his dissolute ways, busting up a bar after corrupting a local “girl” half or even one-third his age.

Oh yes, that’s cringe-worthy. Every scene with some native beauty hanging all over the pasty-sweaty Newton might have been worth a laugh back then, but more stern condemnation today, “consent” or not.

Fear not! Ted’s reckoning is coming, foretold by the missionary and delivered, as justice, by the new “resident” after many Ted transgressions. The locals marvel that “a white man” faces the same justice they do, months of hard labor, for busting up a bar.

The heart of the story here is the mutual contempt shared by Ted and Sister Martha, and the ways that iciness melts. No, it’s not terribly convincing as a plot point, but the screenwriter — director Muriel Box’s husband, Sydney — did the best he could with what he had to work with.

There are some splendid outdoor scenes — a crocodile attack, natives managing their boats, an elephant as pack mule and major plot point.

The picture clocks in at a brisk 82 minutes. That leaves just enough time for the viewer to figure out who in the cast is a native of India or Ceylon or Asia, and where you’ve seen the blackfaced Pleasance (“The Great Escape,” as Blofeld in “You Only Live Twice” and the doctor hunting his worst patient in “Halloween”) or the plummy-voiced and blackfaced Michael Hordern (“Gandhi,” “The Missionary,” “Lady Jane” and one of the most beloved narrators of his day) before.

It’s a curiosity, and an artifact of a seriously tone-deaf era in cinema when it comes to race. And truth be told, aside from the drunk scenes, there’s not a lot of lightheartedness to it.

But “Beachcomber” is worth catching for Newton and Johns’ performances, for the action beats and for the cringyness of it all, a film that reminds us of the way no one British questioned British colonialism — at least not in the movies — for a very long time, and that blackface didn’t truly disappear until after Alec Guinness had one more go of it in “A Passage to India,” some 30 years after “The Beachcomber” tried to cash in on its “African Queen” appeal.

Rating: Approved, violence, lots of drinking, smoking

Cast: Robert Newton, Glynis Johns, Donald Sinden, Paul Rogers, Donald Pleasance, Auric Lorand and Michael Hordern

Credits: Directed by Muriel Box, scripted by Sydney Box. A Rank Organization release, on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:22

Another $11 million for Sony’s Spider, another $7 and change for Paramount’s “Scream.”

Bupkiss went to the few other limited releases, “Clean” among them.

A chef and his new lady-love pursue his dream of his own restaurant and their very own “Michelin star” in “A Taste of Hunger,” a Pinteresque Danish melodrama as frosty as flash-frozen ginger.

It’s built around “Game of Thrones” hunk Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Katrine Greis-Rosenthal (“The Command”), who have chemistry but little heat in carrying this tony, stylish story of life in a high end Copenhagen eatery.

What’s “Pinteresque” here is the way their story is told, out of order (like “Betrayal”), in a shuffled succession of brittle chapters that take their titles from elements of “taste” — “Sour,” “Sweet,” “Heat,” “Salt” and the like.

We see them crackling through a night at their poshly-appointed, over-staffed Malus Restaurant, with the short-tempered perfectionist Carsten humiliating a cook for not remembering that “the only way the chef knows good food from bad” (in Danish with English subtitles) is “TASTING.”

There’s a Michelin star at stake, as there was one suspicious “solo diner” in their seatings for the night, a dead giveaway a Michelin critic/judge has made a stop. “A Taste” takes us back to how the chef and his inspiration, co-owner and cheerleading “I want it all” wife Maggie first met — a “meet cute” at another meal the perfectionist tossed aside to start over on. We see their ensuing family lives, the monomaniacal neglect that endangers the marriage and the children it produces, and surf through their panic over that pivotal night, the measures Maggie is willing to take to earn a “do over” from the make-or-break Michelin man.

A Michelin star can “the portal to paradise, or the road to ruin,” one of Carsten’s mentors tells him. Trained in Japan, the Dane is master of every infused, gelled and nitrogen flash-frozen trend in modern gastronomy. But it takes Maggie to focus him, master the presentation on the plate and ensure the place’s pampered, exclusive vibe.

Just looking at Malus, one can see their business model is nuts and that not getting the Michelin seal of approval and cachet could be the end of them.

“What do we do now? Open a McDonald’s?”

I was more interested in this story than invested in it. Telling the tale out of order reveals stresses that will either break them or bond them as a couple. There are no other real options as for outcomes.

Coster-Waldau masters the posture of the master chef, the Emeril lean-in-so-close-your-nose-almost-touches-the-food thing. He’s most convincing in the snappish meltdowns, which happen more because we know the stress such high-stakes chefs live under than due to any motivations we see on screen.

Greis-Rosenthal brings coy sexiness to their “meet cute,” making Maggie another version of that blunt-to-the-point-of-coarse “modern woman” trope, someone who gets what she wants because she says what she wants and she’s beautiful enough to be certain of never getting turned down.

But the two of them don’t do much to set off sparks together. The picture has warm flirtation, but no sexual heat. The domestic scenes have a perfunctory formality that makes what we’re watching feel pre-digested.

Yes, there are surprises and a scene crackles, here and there. But the tony haute cuisine milieu can fool you into thinking that there’s more to this than the chic, perfectly-presented appetizer this is.

Rating: unrated, sex, profanity

Cast: Katrine Greis-Rosenthal and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

Credits: Directed by Christoffer Boe, scripted by Tobias Lindholm and Christoffer Boe. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:44