Movie Nation

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

The only thing I remember about “The Hit” is how much Siskel & Ebert raved about it back in the day, that “day” being 1985.

An Island Pictures release that didn’t make it to “the provinces,” especially the province I was living in at the time, it stands out today as the movie that illustrates “casting against type” better than most any title one can name.

It stars John Hurt and Terence Stamp, but with the always-wounded-looking, so fragile, so-very-British Hurt (“Alien,” “Contact,””Midnight Express” and “Heaven’s Gate”) as the hired killer, and veteran tough-bloke Stamp (the Christopher Reeve “Superman,” “The Limey,” just seen in “Last Night in Soho”) as his ever-so-Zen target.

Death? “It’s just a moment. We’re here. Then we’re not here. We’re somewhere else… maybe. And it’s as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?”

I’ve been a Stamp fan forever, and I dare say he smiles more in this one movie than in any ten other films he ever made. And grinning Willie Parker, beaming in the opening scenes, a witness protection star in court (a young Jim Broadbent plays the questioning barrister), grinning even more after he’s kidnapped in Spain ten years later, instantly becomes one of Stamp’s finest screen creations.

Stephen Frears (“Philomena,””Victoria & Abdul”) made an auspicious theatrical feature film debut with this nervy, violent and reflective “road picture,” a tale of two hit men, their mark and a “witness” they nab along the way as they make their way from southern Spain to Paris.

The cleverest touch in Peter Prince’s script is one of the most memorably menacing “running gags” in all of cinema. As the criminal compadres Willie “grassed” (ratted out, squealed on) are led from court, they serenade him with a song Vera Lynn made famous during “The War.”

“We’ll…meet again…don’t know where…don’t know WHEN…”

It’s the first thing that comes to Willie’s mind when smiling Willie figures out who’s grabbed him and taken him from his life of comfort and luxury outside a small town (Almodóvar, Córdoba) in the sunbaked south where he’s been laying low.

The four Spanish toughs he tried to fight off weren’t the real culprits. Willie almost knows their fate before they do. This officious, short and silent man in Cuban heel boots, a linen suit, cigarette and Raybans was calling the shots. That makes Willie sing — “I know we’ll meet again…some sunny day!”

Braddock (Hurt) the mostly-silent stranger is called. He has a young, mouthy punk of a protege (Tim Roth, barely of shaving age here) in tow. Braddock blowing up most of the blokes who first grabbed Willie wasn’t the subtlest move. They can hear about the nationwide manhunt that’s begun on the radio, but only Willie speaks Spanish. They can see the photos on the newspapers, which only Willie can read.

They’re taking him to Paris, and that news contributes to Willie’s Most Relaxed Condemned Man Ever manner. He smirks and runs through the possibilities, the fact that their current car is known to the police (Fernando Rey of “The French Connection” has almost no lines as their stoic pursuer), that there’s a hard border crossing into France to be managed.

“I’m sure true love will see us through!”

The assassin is silent. The kid protests, “You’ve got nothing to smile about mate, if you knew.” “If I knew?” Willie turns to his executioner. “He thinks I don’t know.“

Their odyssey will require another car, more murders, another kidnapping (Laura del Sol), and another victim who isn’t quite so mellow about what she is sure will be their shared fate. Maggie fights and schemes and will not go quietly.

What this classic film captures is a sunny, sleepy pre-European Union Spain, with bad roads, tiny towns and cantinas that the world had passed by, and the most breathtaking scenery of any hit man thriller.

Hurt’s killer-of-few-words is a classic type, not new to the genre but almost definitive thanks to his poker-faced portrayal. “The kid” apprentice is also a type. But the smiling, laid-back and at peace with it all victim is something new, and Stamp gives Willie charm and an infuriating passivity.

We don’t need Maggie’s rages to come to that conclusion. This guy either knows something will break his way if he picks his moment, or truly is at peace with his fate.

Everything about “The Hit” is archetypal and genre-defining. “The Hit” prefigured John Woo’s “The Killer” and those two 1980s movies reset the template for the genre.

And looking at it nearly 40 years later, what stands out is the moment-in-time perfection of it all. Hurt was having his big cinema moment, but this cast him against type. Stamp was starting a comeback that has carried on, almost to this very day. Roth announced he was ready for the spotlight.

And TV director Frears showed himself as a filmmaker to be reckoned with. “Prick up Your Ears” and “My Beautiful Launderette,” “Sammie and Rosie Get Laid,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Dirty Pretty Things,” “The Van,” “High Fidelity” would follow, making him one of the most accomplished British directors of his generation and the best British filmmaker never to have a damned thing to do with Harry Potter.

Rating: R, bloody violence, profanity

Cast: John Hurt, Terence Stamp, Laura del Sol, Tim Roth, Fernando Rey, Bill Hunter and Jim Broadbent.

Credits:Directed by Stephen Frears, scripted by Peter Prince. An Island Pictures/MGM Video release on Tubi, Amazon and other streamers

Running time: 1:38

This looks properly cheesy, if not as funny or fun as one might hope. Sometimes they don’t give away the store in the trailer, tho. So there’s hope.

“Uncharted” the treasure hunt thriller opens Feb. 18.

“The Translator” has made a nice life for himself in Australia, using his multi-lingual skills for government entities and journalists, married and, since he’s from Syria, relieved to have escaped a past of justifiable paranoia and danger.

But when the Arab Spring breaks out in his home country, a journalist pal urges Sami Najjar to join him in covering it. Sami finds himself facing that past, still wracked by the guilt over how he got out and those he left behind. To them, he is a “hider,” someone who has never taken a stand, always “hiding behind the words of others.”

Rana Kazkaz and Anas Khalaf’s gripping, engrossing film is part thriller, part history lesson and somewhat melodramatic as it takes us into the secrets of Sami’s past, the fraught situation he finds himself in back in Syria and the blend of gratitude, relief and resentment he faces from the family and friends he reconnects with there.

Because we’ve seen snippets of what Sami and Syria went through in childhood, a 1980 outbreak of protests against the Syrian dictatorship. He saw his father dragged off, never to be seen again. He say his slightly-older brother Zaid fight to free him while Sami stood terrified.

And we have an idea of how the adult Sami ended up in Australia. Something happened during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, an athlete questioned about Syria’s abrupt decision to decree that the son of the former dictator take over after the death of his father, a “translation” that made Sami persona non grata back home.

Ziad Bakri gives us a Sami who considers his words and actions with care, but who is conflicted about what he left behind and what he owes the friends and family in Damascus. He has a new life and a lawyer-wife (Miranda Tapsell). They’re looking at houses.

And this journalist friend and sponsor (David Field), the man he appears to owe much of this new life to, is showing him video of the Arab Spring (2011), which has spread from Tunisia to Egypt and now Syria.

“It’s my job to verify,” Chase says. And Sami reluctantly agrees to accompany his friend, to risk slipping across the border from Lebanon to document the popular uprising against a dictatorship that is all most of those there, young and old, have ever known. Sami also figures he might be able to help his brother Zaid, now an activist who has disappeared into government custody.

But when violent events on the ground put Sami on his own, he must rely on his brother’s ophthalmologist wife, Karma (Yumna Marwan), a defiant woman who can’t always hide her contempt for him. He must hide with his sister, LouLou (Sawsan Arshid), who caresses his Australian passport as if it’s the Holy Grail. And Sami must face everything that happened to get him out, and all the guilt he still feels about being the “hider” Karma and others label him.

“The Translator” never fails to hold our interest as we’re taken into street protests, witnessing what appears to be Sami’s growing sense of responsibility in the face of futility. The “international community” was reluctant to act against a heavily-armed, Russian-backed dictatorship. Sami is no journalist, but he’s been around it long enough to see ways he can help.

The story’s “secrets” are concealed somewhat clumsily, and that coupled with a sea of unfamiliar faces and character names — Syrian and Australian — can leave the viewer unmoored, a little lost.

Wait, what did I miss?

And the film’s climax is nothing if not high stakes melodrama. Every major figure from Sami’s childhood will return to help or haunt him, every misstep he took to find sanctuary in Australia will come back to slap him in the face.

But “The Translator” delivers a fascinating new take on the immigrant experience, reminding us that the faceless masses flocking from east, south and Middle East to this or that Western shore aren’t coming on a whim. There’s persecution, life-and-death danger in speaking out and staying, and the risks are just as great for those who flee.

When Karma cynically predicts the future, we’re reminded of how rare it is for dictatorships to fall in popular uprisings. Places like North Korea and Syria, Russia and China, may never be free, because Karma reminds us, “violence will always win.”

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ziad Bakri, Yumna Marwan, David Field, Sawsan Arshid and Miranda Tapsell

Credits: Directed by Rana Kazkaz and Anas Khalaf, scripted by Magali Negroni. A Launch release.

Running time: 1:45

Labeling “Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman” as “trash” gives this fictionalized, sensationalized and generally incompetent take on America’s most infamous female serial killer credit it doesn’t deserve. “Trash” suggests there might be something “fun” to it.

This pseudo-serious “reclaiming” of Wuornos from the Oscar-winning portrait that “Monster” became, from her ongoing tabloid and website infamy, is more garbage than trash.

Ashley Atwood, with the aid of makeup and prosthetics, plays Wuornos in a deranged night-before-her-execution film interview with a Brit (Hamish Sturgeon) probably meant to be documentarian Nick Broomfield. And in the film’s most accurate touch, Peyton List, far shorter than Oscar-winner Charlize Theron, plays the young Aileen on her first trip to Florida, when she seduced and was briefly married to a Deland “yacht club commodore” three times her age in 1976.

Writer-director Daniel Farrands, who plies the trashy side of the cinema tracks (“The Haunting of Sharon Tate,” “The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson”), filmed in and around Marina del Rey, which can pass for Daytona Beach. Sort of. But that’s as much effort as he made in the name of “accuracy.”

He puts Wuornos in the biker bar “where she enjoyed her last beer” years before the infamous Last Resort opened. He puts the smitten old sailor Lewis Gratz Fell (Bell) on a sailing yacht design that’s about 30 years off. He has Aileen telling tales, lying about murders that predate her 1989-1990 spree, which led to her conviction and execution in 2003.

And he lets the pre-execution Wuornos speak with a thick Southern drawl, in the interview and in voice-overs where she talks about this strange interlude in her life — as a hot-tempered prostitute who befriends a young woman (Lydia Hearst) on a “private beach” (no such thing in Florida) and then seduces and marries her rich father.

Wuornos grew up in Michigan. She had no drawl.

The woman’s awful childhood is hinted at. But what the film dwells on is her sordid way of making enough money to live on and a hair-trigger temper, evident in the film a dozen years before her most violent side showed itself.

The older Wuornos is smirking, self-satisfied, eating up her notoriety. The younger one sticks up for herself to such a degree that everything triggers her — not just abusive “johns,” sexual assault-minded barflies, but a dress store clerk who rubs her the wrong, snobby way.

Jennifer Tell (Hearst) sees her as “a hero to all the girls” for cold-cocking this jerk or that would-be abuser. Aileen first starts to see herself that way, the film says, in 1976.

List is “out there” and credibly violent in the role. But there’s nothing to the performance but that tough, two-fisted surface. The older Aileen may protest of her life of abuse, but the younger one gives little hint of the tragedy of her childhood, the damage or the miles.

As someone who chased the production of “Monster” all over the real locations future “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins filmed on, who watched filming in the “real” Last Resort, who didn’t recognize Theron on set the first two or three times I saw her in character, and who interviewed Theron, co-stars Christina Ricci and Bruce Dern, I think there’s validity in the intent of “American Boogeywoman.”

“Monster” changed names and fictionalized a lot, too. “Reclaiming” Wuornos, stripping her of notoriety and all the things attached to her “legend” is a worthwhile goal. Even sending up her image — which seems to have been the intent here — would have been fair.

And List’s take, superficial as it is, might have amounted to a good jumping-off-point for a portrayal of the murderer.

But this hack filmmaker wasn’t the guy to find anything lofty or seedy, honorable, amusing or even interesting in this grim tale. This clumsy, heartless cut-rate production never rises from garbage to the level of trash.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sex, partial nudity, profanity

Cast: Peyton List, Tobin Bell, Lydia Hearst, Hamish Sturgeon and Ashley Atwood

Credits: Scripted and directed by Daniel Farrands. A Voltage Films/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

“Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched” is a documentary about the history of “folk horror,” a film of almost breathtaking thoroughness in exploring what that term means, the shared pagan stories that span the globe and inspired it, and the movies in cultures all over the world that have spun out of this tradition.

If you’re a fan of the genre, which takes in films from “The Wicker Man” and “Midsommar” to pretty much anything with a witch, demons, shape-shifters or a rural setting, settle in for sometimes brilliant, often pithy explorations of where or that piece of folklore, these traditions and all those films came from. Maybe watch “Woodlands Dark” in chunks, as it is an awful lot to take in and you won’t want to miss much of its over three hours of study.

Writer-director Kier-La Janisse begins with the British obsession with the genre, with fans, journalists and experts of various persuasions placing the boom in the genre — it dates from near the beginning of cinema, but really hit its stride in the 1970s — within cultural tradition and historical context. We learn about the literary forebears who invented it (think “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” among others).”

And then the documentary expands, like the horror genre it’s about, to envelop the planet. Not many cultures aren’t represented in the movie’s vast survey of global folk horror cinema.

As its core, folk horror is a “return to the Olde Ways” friction between rural and urban, something that emerged when many first fled for the cities during the Industrial Revolution, but which blew up again as people abandoned cities in the Earth Day (US) and “back to the land” youth movements of the ’70s.

As tropes of the genre are trotted out in their many different forms, film scholar David Howard Ingram lands what I thought was the money shot. These movies are about times long past, times recently past and times right this minute. They’re about “modern” aka “urban” people and their educations, their belief in science, vs. “traditional” people, be they from rural Britain, Appalachia or anywhere mask mandates and vaccinations not ordained by their cult leader are protested and avoided.

“‘We don’t go back,'” Ingram says, quoting a man-of-science in an obscure horror film sampled here. That’s “the fundamental tension of ‘folk horror,'” this notion that returning to ancient, generally pagan rituals, traditions and superstitions is not in the cards for the modern people (the viewer’s surrogate) often trapped in “Midsommar,” waylaid by “The Witch” or “other” folks fearing this “tradition” or that belief.

We track through the decades in which “witches became cool again” in the culture, and on screen, when “The Candyman” made his bow or “La Llorona” first sheds her tears in Old Mexico…and Japan and other places which have a “mother who drowned her own children” legend.

This film is a crash course in this corner of horror, and a must-see for fans or even those curious about the many ways this pull towards the pagan manifested itself over in movies over the decades. A pretty good chunk of the horror coming out now spins out of “The Babadook” or “Witcher” or assorted witch hunters and primal sacrifices, with Netflix and Amazon full to the brim with offerings in the folk horror genre in film or limited series form.

But being this long and broad in scope, “Woodlands” can’t help but feel repetitive — exhaustingly-so.

It’s fascinating to see the similarities folk myths share among many cultures, the ghosts, shape-shifters and witches of Britain and Japan, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and North America. A

Yet at some point, as the movie see-saws between clips and references to celebrated and/or popular and iconic films — “The Wicker Man,” “Lair the White Worm,” “Midsommar” and “The Amityville Horror” — and more obscure titles like “Hex” and “Edge of the Knife” and “A Field in England,” it all starts to seem like a contest between the scores of interviewed filmmakers, genre obsessive authors, festival organizers and the like.

“Ah, but HERE’s one YOU’VE never heard of.”

And as the film goes on and on, through its second and third hours and starting on its fourth, the broadening definition of “folk horror” takes in titles that make you scratch your head while leaving out this obvious “Indian burial ground” title (“Poltergeist”) or skipping over that folklorish found footage blockbuster “The Blair Witch Project.” At times, it’s so broad as to seem almost meaningless as a subgenre.

There are dazzling experts who plainly know their subject, and a giggling critic, a stumbling Brit who refers to a title as “the Uber text” or a particular subgenre, and this other bloke who insists we credit him — insists REPEATEDLY — with coining the term “folk horror,” when as he himself admits it pre-dates him using it by nearly a century.

None of which should scare you away, especially if this genre is your jam. But take seriously that suggestion that you don’t immerse yourself in “Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched” in a single sitting. Taken all at once, the film’s aesthetic, informational and entertainment virtues lose a lot of ground to “Right, we GET it” and “Why didn’t you edit this to something more compact and less repetitious?” attitudes.

Rating: nudity, violence

Cast: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alice Lowe, Piers Haggard, Robert Eggers, many others

Credits Scripted and directed by Kier-La Janisse. A Shudder release.

Running time: 3:14

Stumbling across any Akira Kurosawa film you’ve missed is an unexpected delight, and the film noir “Stray Dog” has the added pleasure of being an early showcase of the director, his muse — Toshiro Mifune — and his other rep company regular, Takashi Shimura.

It’s a police procedural as fascinating for its depiction of post-war Japan as it is for the acting of then-rising star Mifune and the growing artistry of its legend-in-the-making director.

The future director of “Rashomon,” “The Seven Samurai,” “Ran” and “Yojimbo,” whose “The Hidden Fortress” provided the template for “Star Wars,” shows a flair for montage, superimposing immaculately-composed images to capture the frenetic mind of a rookie cop (Mifune) who loses his police-issued pistol.

Kurosawa treats us to cagey interrogations and breathless chases, and cleverly co-scripts and stages a police trap at a Yomuri Giants baseball game, all in a post-war thriller where characters start burnishing/rewriting the nation’s history by referring to WWII veterans of the Imperial Japanese armed forces as the “post-war generation.”

That’s how the sage homicide Detective Sato (Shimura) describes green Detective Murakami (Mifune) when they’re assigned to work together. Murakami lost his gun, and in his frantic search for it, tails and then arrests the fence (Noriko Sengoku) whose hands it passed through.

He spends days, dressing down in his stained and tattered old army uniform, working the back alleys of bombed-out Tokyo, hoping to attract the attention of illegal gun sellers.

When ballistics confirm it’s been used in a shooting, Murakami writes a letter of resignation, so deep is his shame. But his boss tears it up, shaking his head.

“Bad luck either makes a man, or destroys him.” He’s giving the rookie an experienced partner to help solve the growing list of shootings and track down the “bad guys.” That fence could be their key to a hidden corner of the gun smuggling underworld.

Sato “hates the bad guys,” but Murakami — a man with his own demons and flaws — is more “modern” and liberal in his thinking.

“They say there’s no such thing as a ‘bad man,’ only bad situations,” he muses (in Japanese with English subtitles).

“We can’t forget the many sheep a lone wolf leaves wounded,” Sato counters. And as they work through suspects, on up the ladder towards the “stray dog” who has become “a mad dog,” the stakes rise around them and Murakami’s mania for breaking the case and getting his man grows.

Kurosawa quickly grasped the conventions of the police procedural, and left a firm Japanese imprint on the genre in conjuring up this tale. Murakami consults with ballistics and takes part in crime scene investigations even as he takes on more and more guilt over what his Colt automatic pistol is being used to do.

The pacing is more sedate, and scenes such as the search for the gun amidst the shops, food stalls, gamblers, hookers and hustlers of Tokyo’s underbelly go on much longer than Hollywood, which made several versions of this sort of story in that era, would have allowed.

The “occupation era” of Japan is glimpsed in the American style nightclubs with Japanese takes on the scantily clad chorus line of showgirls, the neon bedecked nightclubs (the “Blue Bird” is one), the value of a “rice card” (food rationing ID) and the general lack of automobiles or air conditioning in this sweltering summer.

This was Mifune’s third film for Kurosawa, and there’s a growing comfort level that informs his performance. Kurosawa is making him a star, yes. But the trust evident in scenes in which Murakami breaks down, in which the “star” assumes complete deference to the older cop he’s assigned to and in the startling close-ups that show us the rookie’s deteriorating state is already making Mifune the icon he would become in “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai” and beyond.

That “trust” and “comfort” is also evident in the way Kurosawa turns so much of the narrative over to Shimura’s Sato. While the actor would go on to many other Kurosawa films, the director would showcase him in the wistful masterpiece “Ikiru” just a couple of years later.

Shimura might be most-remembered for his place in the Godzillaverse. But “Ikiru” is almost certainly his best role and his finest performance. Kurosawa gave him that spotlight right after “Rashomon” made the actors’, the director’s and indeed Japanese cinema’s reputation in the rest of the world.

Rating: violence, profanity

Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Awaji, Noriko Sengoku and Yasushi Nagata

Credits: Directed by Akira Kurosawa, scripted by Ryûzô Kikushima and Akira Kurosawa. A Toho release on Tubi, Amazon, other streamers

Running time: 2:02