Movie Nation

Anyone who grew up during the first Cold War remembers “Duck and Cover” drills, the “Domino Theory,” the proven-accurate warnings of communist enslavement and the Red Baiting by a political party that would later come to embrace minoritarian rule and Russian strongarm fascism as its creed.

The stress of living in the shadow of that produced some of the most enduring cinema of that age — the Bond films and all manner of more serious espionage thrillers, the grim warnings of “Failsafe” and its satiric flipside, “Doctor Strangelove, of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

And there were classic comedies that came out of the Cold War as well. Billy Wilder’s Coca-Cola Cold War lampoon “One, Two Three” (1961) might be the greatest, for my money one of the funniest films ever made. And Norman Jewison’s “The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming!” gives it a run for its money.

A fish-out-of-water farce about a Russian sub that runs aground Down East, just off a fictional Massachusetts island, it is cultures clashing at their most comical and a grand Make Work Project for every character actor in Hollywood in the style of that “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World” era.

A jaunty Russo-American score by Johnny Mandel, elbow-jabbing cameos left and right, grand slapstick spinning around Carl Reiner, in his finest Everyman big screen performance, with an antic turn by legendary comic Jonathan Winters and seething slow-burn by Brian Keith, it was the also the big screen debut of one the greatest character actors of our age — Alan Arkin.

This trailer from the time sold it, then and now, and lets Reiner trot out his “roving TV reporter” shtick from the early TV and “The 2,000 Year Old Man” routines with Mel Brooks. Did Reiner write it? It sure plays like that.

This movie was a beloved piece of my childhood (I only ever saw it on TV). And when I grew into my big boy pants and could start collecting movie posters, it was the first I bought, a “Mad Magazine” style illustration by the great cartoonist Jack Davis.

When the Florida Film Festival lined up the Oscar-winning Arkin for “An Evening With” tribute some years back, this was the movie Arkin chose to show and talk about afterwards. He ended up calling in sick for that appearance, but not before I got him on the phone to talk about it, a thrill-of-a-lifetime interview with one of my heroes.

Watching “Russians” last night what hit me the hardest was how brilliantly-acted the thing is, top to bottom.

The most hilarious scenes are the Keystone Comrades ones among the Russian crew. Jewison, a seven-time Oscar nominee who went on to make “Moonstruck” and “The Thomas Crown Affair,” was best known for his socially relevant dramas — “In the Heat of the Night,” “The Hurricane,” “A Soldier’s Story.” He instantly creates friction, paranoia and disconnection in scenes that on some prints of the film have no translated subtitles, which heightens their alienation.

We get comical, irritable shouting matches in Russian between Arkin, who grew up speaking Russian thanks to his immigrant parents, and the great multi-lingual character player Theodore Bikel, who plays the reckless “just wanted to see America” (through the periscope) captain to Arkin’s sub “political officer,” the only English speaker in the crew.

Bikel makes the captain’s CYA lashing-out panic palpable, and Arkin launches his screen acting career with the forced-patience of seething, exasperated dismay at idiots-all-around-me that became something of a trademark. He was still trotting it out as the Old Man of Hollywood in his Oscar-nominated turn in “Argo.”

And establishing the cast’s Russian language bonafides (a Russian speaker supporting player also served as dialect coach) makes the Russian-accented fractured English trotted out by Arkin and his comrades that much more authentic, and hilarious, when they must interact with the Gloucester Island Yankees.

“Plizz to remain absolutely good behaved so zat zis man, marksman of prize-winning caliber, will not have the necessity of shutting you to small pisses!”

“Emehrgancy! Everybody to get from STRIT!”

There are nuances to Keith’s performance as the increasingly frustrated “let’s everybody calm down” police chief. The part, as written (by “Ladykillers” screenwriter William Rose, adapting the Nathaniel Benchley novel) and played by Keith, begins as sleepy and indulgent, a character who makes the journey to exasperated and furious thanks to the rising level of chaos around him, the literal sabre rattling by the foolish old vet who appoints himself “leader” (Paul Ford, more hilarious than usual) and the shenanigans of Russian sub crewmen, sneaking about town, wrecking the phone system, taking locals hostage and trying to “borrow” a motorboat to pull their (replica) sub off the sandbar that Kapitan Klumsikov has run them onto.

The young Russian sailor (John Phillip Law of “Barbarella”) who holds the playwright (Reiner) and his family (Eva Marie Saint is criminally under-used as the put-upon wife) hostage, and falls for the blonde American babysitter (Andrea Dromm) is a pleasant-enough distraction from the island-wide panic and convoys of locals either fleeing or hunting for Russians.

Winters is in fine form as the dizzy top cop under the chief. Veteran players Dora Murunde, Tessie O’Shea and Parker Fennelly make cute/crank impressions as dotty locals. Everywhere you look on this coastal California shoot, there are funny and familiar faces from the films and TV of the era.

And Keith’s future “Family Affair” TV co-star Johnny Whitaker plays the child who is the focus of the film’s still-touching climax.

Jewison uses crane shots to capture the growing chaos of a village of delusional descendants of “Minutemen” swarming hither and yon, often running past or over Reiner’s Walt Whitaker, the “reasonable” man of the city who knows what this is all about and how to couch it in the least harmful terms, if only he can get the rubes to listen to him.

The title and the whole Paul Revere angle to it gives the film one hilarious recurring gag, the tipsy yokel (silent cinema vet Ben Blue) chasing his recalcitrant horse all over the island so that he can mount it to cry out the alarm. The horse’s teasing, just-beyond-my-owner’s-reach game is maybe the subtlest pratfall in the film.

The whole West Coast subbing for the East coast thing, and the choice of film stock, gives “Russians” the look of a film whose every exterior looks as if it was shot at about 7 am. Given its real-time/reel-time, that isn’t out of order. The idea is that all of this happens before everybody is wholly awake, although of course the bar can open early, “CASH only,” for Winters’ cop to preach “We’ve got to get ORGANIZED” in.

Perhaps Saint wouldn’t have been up to anything more comic in her high-billed/little-used supporting role. She’s not remembered for her comic chops. The only genuine time-wasting bit is stopping to give then-unknown character player Michael J. Pollard close-ups for his mannered, fussy bit role as mechanic who runs the airport.

But this picture still plays, amusingly anchored by Reiner, playing the fish MOST out of water, exasperated at every turn at his family, his TV-violence-addicted son (Sheldon Collins, gloriously obnoxious), the menacing Russians and almost-as-menacing locals.

I don’t know what the film has to say to people today (the Canadian Jewison could certainly have made that case), with the country at its most divided and a full third of it admiring Russia, Russian influence-money and envying its single-party rule. Maybe it’s the escape to a simpler time, when we all had a notion of who we were and where the real threat lay, that has value in this 56 year-old classic.

What matters is it is aging beautifully, that Arkin may have won his Oscar decades later, but he was never better than in this epic comedy, slow-burning in Russian and English with the funniest people in Hollywood surrounding him.

Wish I hadn’t lost the poster.

Rating: unrated, some violence, lots of threats

Cast: Carl Reiner, Alan Arkin, Eva Marie Saint, Brian Keith, Jonathan Winters, John Phillip Law, Andrea Dromm, Paul Ford and Theodore Bikel — with Ben Blue, Dora Murande, Parker Fennelly, Guy Raymond, Cliff Norton, Tessie O’Shea, Richard Schaal, Oscar Maxwell and little Johnny Whitaker

Credits: Directed by Norman Jewison, scripted by William Rose, based on the novel by Nathaniel Benchley. A United Artists release on Tubi, Roku, Amazon and elsewhere.

Running time: 2:06

It happens so fast, so abruptly, that we’re almost as rattled and surprised as the character it happens to.

Officer Mike Tan’s department-issued pistol goes off as he draws it out of its holster. He wasn’t pointing it, wasn’t in sight of the suspect he and his partner were chasing on a hunch. It was an accident, but in “A Shot Through the Wall,” we learn of the ramifications and consequences of this in-the-moment blunder.

The debut feature of writer-director Aimee Long is a somber, thought-provoking essay on policing, race, firearms and family. We see the a young man die from that random, careless shot, the defensive circling of the police department wagons that accompanies any “officer involved shooting” and the aching guilt of the man in blue who had no reason to have his hand on the trigger in the first place.

Kenny Leu of TV’s “The Long Walk Home” and “Kat Loves LA” is Officer Tan, a decent sort who dotes on his Chinese immigrant parents (Fiona Fu, Tzi Ma), counts himself lucky in his choice of fiancée (Ciara Renée) but probably wishes his partner hadn’t profiled those Black Brooklyn teens whom they’d expected to be in school. He really wishes one kid hadn’t fled, and Tan rues the day he chased the kid — because he fled a police stop-and-frisk — into an apartment building where the seemingly simple act of unholstering his firearm, under duress, ends one life and threatens to unravel his.

The story is told in flashback, the three months leading up to an introductory mother/son “cooking” opening scene — from the impromptu rookie-cop team’s chase and shooting, to the police union rep (Dan Lauria) who assures him “Everything’s gonna be fine,” to the blowback that turns that reassurance on its ear.

Suffice it to say there was cell phone video, the victim was Black and public tolerance for this sort of “mistake” by armed, aggressive police is at an all-time low.

Long tells this story entirely from the clumsy cop’s point of view, fleshing out the doting but nagging parents, the Black, mixed-race social worker he plans to marry and her resistance to being used in any “He CAN’T be a racist” media campaign thanks to the way her precinct chief dad (Clifton Davis, quite good) was showcased as the face of departmental tolerance for years.

Leu and Long play up the guilt Tan feels and the guarded way any human gesture — showing up at a vigil, trying to speak to the grieving mother — is impossible in any situation like this. The union and the lawyers won’t have it, the grieving families resist it and the media pokes a finger into any open wound it recognizes in media-mad New York.

Relationships suffer all up and down the line, knowing the “right thing” to say or do in the face of legal action, the fraught nature of race both within the NYPD and how it is viewed by the public

That said, “A Shot Through the Wall” pulls its punches, here and there, and doesn’t land a clean blow in the convoluted way Long tries to address institutional racism in this story. The ending is as abrupt as the shooting at the beginning, and entirely too pat to be believed. And layering in cooking in any Chinese-American tale is simply a cliche, at this point.

But Leu makes a solid lead, Renée a properly conflicted love interest and in Fu and Ma, Long gives Chinese-American parents who transcend the Hollywood stereotypes of such characters — at least somewhat.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kenny Leu, Ciara Renée, Fiona Fu, Tzi Ma, Dan Lauria and Clifton Davis

Credits: Scripted and directed by Aimee Long. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:29

A dramatic romance with twists, the picture has the A24 seal of approval.

This Feb. 11 release gives us an Apple option for our Valentine’s Day viewing.

Looks complicated.

There’s something to be said for a B-movie that doesn’t deviate from formula, that pulls you in to its simple “revenge” plot and doesn’t let go until the credits roll.

Oscar-winner Adrien Brody knows what I’m talking about. Sure, he takes Wes Anderson’s calls, and never turns down a showy TV role in a high profile series — “Peaky Blinders” and “Succession” among them.

But one gets the impression he’d chuck anything with “prestige” attached to it just to play another brooding loner, just for another shot at being the mysterious man of violence who lives through his (voice over) interior monologues, just for another chance to bump fists and share a “My MAN” with RZA.

Nic Cage works constantly to distract himself from whatever troubles haunt him. Cusack loves black baseball cap riffs that suggest he’s a big screen bad guy, and maybe a bit scary. Brody? He immerses himself in genre grit, panning for “cool” and not gold in B movie after B movie.

“Clean” is the character’s name and his profession. He’s a solitary sanitation worker who covers his urban New York route in silence, save for the voice narrating inside his dead.

“I’m still looking for answers. I just don’t know the question.” Garbage and junk are his life. He’s cleaning up a “filthy world.” But that trash, “Where does it all go?”

Clean picks up junk that can be salvaged or fixed — bikes to vacuums. Even his after-hours ride, an ’80s Buick Grand National Regal, is junk kept running by other junk.

He feeds a scrapyard dog, paints over graffiti in the sea of abandoned housing (Utica, New York is the primary location). And when he sees her waiting for the bus, he gives a tween (Chandler DuPont) a bag lunch, a kind word or a ride. Her granny’s “She’s not your daughter” and “We don’t need anyone to save us'” earns a “Just trying to save myself,” which is implicit.

Yes, he’s in a 12 step program. Mykelti Williamson is his righteous sponsor and barber who keeps Clean on the straight and narrow. RZA is the pawn shop operator who buys antiques that Clean fixes.

But there’s a mob in town, and the boss (Glenn Fleshler, gloriously vile) has noticed what the guy nobody notices notices. And that’s sure to spell trouble when the boss and the corrupt cops in his orbit spills some blood seemingly to celebrate the dissolute son who gets out of prison.

You could number the surprises in this formulaic “the trashman wasn’t always a trashman” thriller somewhere between “few” and “none.” We can read everything we need to know about the character in Brody’s choice of hoodie and hair style. The reason the little girl is there is for rescuing. The whole point of putting him in a Grand National is for a muscle car/police chase in which the anti-hero can pretend to shift gears.

I didn’t care. Brody is riveting in this part, which he co-wrote with director Paul Solet.

It’s fascinating to read the actor’s self-image into every “good bad man” trope he trots out. And in his umpteenth slumming on that side of the cinema tracks, he’s made a good bad movie, with every scripted shortcoming, every too-obvious “take out the trash” analogy, every vain “I’m not some coddled movie star, I’m a badass” pose just as much an asset as it is a failing.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Adrien Brody, Glenn Fleshler, Chandler DuPont, Mykelti Williamson, Michelle Wilson and RZA

Credits: Directed by Paul Solet, scripted by Adrien Brody and Paul Solet. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:34

This Feb. 17 release produced a trailer that gave me a chuckle or three. Prom King “evolves” into a leader of witches, plainly under false pretenses.

Check out the DIY energy in this fly-on-the-wall take on misspent youth, high school recklessness and aimlessness.

“Fight Club” “Sk8rboi” garage band suburbanites misbehaving as only they can (and get away with it).

“Therapy Dogs” has its premiere at Slamdance, because it’s way too cool looking for Sundance.

I avoid checking out early sound films as a rule. The bulky cameras and sound gear make for static productions. The acting is of a more theatrical “classical” pre-“Method” era and seems as stagebound as the blocking and camera work.

The film of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Street Scene” might be a case in point. But King Vidor’s film of this single (almost) set movie leans into those handicaps and makes a fascinating time capsule for Depression Era America, the state of American drama, pre-Production Code cinema and the motion picture just as it was evolving into the talking motion picture.

It’s a chatty character study parked firmly on the stoop of a New York Hell’s Kitchen brownstone, a “Hot enough for you?” summer tale of infidelity, gossip and a melting pot that more or less melted together so long as nobody got their backs up about xenophobia, Italian flattery of Mussolini and the one Jewish family could turn a deaf ear to anti-Semitic slurs and a bullying goon.

The acting varies from subtle to ham on the hoof. Legendary stage and screen character actress Beulah Bondi stands up for acting’s old school, milking her tone-deaf, judgmental and hypocritical busybody Mrs. Jones for all that she’s worth.

“What them foreigners don’t know about bringin’ up a baby would fill a book.”

Characters can seem like caricatures — such as Mrs. Jones’ mob goon son (T.H. Manning) and bottle blonde floozie of a daughter (Greta Granstedt).

But what stands out is the subtle turn by Sylvia Sidney as Rose, a sexually-harassed office worker fending off her boss’s advances, enjoying the company of the sensitive Jewish neighbor Sam (William Collier Jr.), but struggling to keep the peace between her lonely and possibly-straying mother (Estelle Taylor) and her bluff and abusive stage hand husband (David Landau).

Rice’s snapshot of tenement life is straight-up melodrama, with the various “types” behaving mostly according to type, and an ending preordained based on the what we learn about the characters in the opening act. His single-set show has characters calling out of windows, climbing through windows, harassing and sticking up for each other, passing around ice cream cones one moment, judging the next.

Vidor, with director of photography George Barnes (and uncredited assistant from future “Citizen Kane” wizard Gregg Toland), only manages a few visual flourishes in an opening sequence (crane shots) that might have been filmed silently and looped later, insofar as that process was developed at the time.

“Street Scene” is famously “pre-Code” although the only surviving print of it is apparently “approved,” as in tidied up according to Production Code standards. It’s still jarring to hear long-abandoned slurs dropped with the casual ease of regular use.

As dated as it obviously is, there’s a timeless quality to the work that makes it a cultural touchstone, the movie anyone making a New York City period piece today consults and references when recreating the “street scenes” of a “Godfather,” “Do the Right Thing” or what have you. What everybody observes about neighborhood life, Rice observed and recorded first almost 100 years ago.

The fact that the play was later made into an opera by Kurt Weill seems almost redundant. Rice’s dialogue, performed in solos or duets, is the music of the ’20s (the play premiered in 1929), so imitated its like every New York Depression movie since has been a sing-along.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, David Landau, William Collier Jr., Russell Hopton, George Humbert, Greta Granstedt, Max Montor and John Qualen

Credits: Directed by King Vidor, scripted by Elmer Rice, adapted from his play. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:28

If you’re not watching Netflix’s series adaptation of Luke Pearson’s “Hilda” books, about a little Scandinavian girl interacting and learning about the magical creatures all around her, the feature-length film “Hilda and the Mountain King” may not be the most comprehensible introduction to this world.

A follow-up to the most recent “Hilda” series, it plunges us straight into her reality, mid-dilemma, and forces the viewer to adjust to the simple, TV-budget animation, the vast clutter of characters and what that does to a story that breaks down “prejudice” into its root words — “pre judging.”

Aimed at the very youngest viewers, Hilda (voiced by Bella Ramsey) is a curious child raised by her doting single-mom (Daisy Haggard), with a couple of human friends at school, and assorted magical beings and critters who help her through various predicaments.

“Mountain King” hurls her into her biggest challenge yet. A resident of Trolberg, where the cynical, fearmongering chief of the guards Erik Ahlberg (John Hopkins) keeps the locals terrified of the trolls outside the wall that protects them, Hilda finds herself swapping places with a troll.

Her Mom is dealing with an unruly replacement baby troll named Baba, while Hilda is now a troll, trapped under the mountain with creatures who can angry and pitiless, or merely misunderstood and confused at why the humans hate them.

Hilda rages and tries to flee, and only calms down when she’s walked-through this world by sympathetic Trylla (Rachel August) and forlorn Trundle (Dino Kelly).

Increasingly frantic Mom enlists the family’s magical friends in her search, struggling to find a way “into” the mountains, chased by evil trolls, saved (literally) by the “bells” which locals use to ward off troll attacks.

Hilda’s pals Frida and David (Ameerah Falzon-Ojo, Oliver Nelson) struggle to push back the rising tide of fear and lashing-out in Trolberg, driven by troll attacks, and by prejudice and the fearmongering of Ahlberg, Mr. “Your safety is safe with me.”

Hilda is sent on mini-quests as she learns that there are both good trolls and bad ones, “just like people,” and that trolls like to hoard things either cast off from human life, or purloined from it.

On the positive side, the film has semi-buried lessons about processing one’s feelings, stepping back from any rush to judgment and mistrusting authority when it tells you things you can see with your own eyes aren’t true. Most of the protagonists are female — even the troll mother Trylla — and they’re the ones who push dilemmas towards resolutions.

The animation, as with the Annie (Animation) Award winning series, is an acquired taste. And the story, by this stage, has a clutter to it — burdened with loads of characters who do little more than add visual complexity to scenes that are, by the standards of the best animated children’s entertainment of today, crude, almost stick-figure ugly.

Comparisons to the worlds created by Hayao Miyazaki seem breathlessly generous. This never feels that thought-out or polished. “Adventure Time” seems the benchmark comparison here — an almost humorless “Adventure Time.” The whole “world” is disconnected from ours, abstracted beyond far beyond “Dragon Tales” or similarly simplistic American made children’s TV.

The French film and series “Arthur and the Minomoys” was what came to mind for me, something odd and alien and dense with characters and its own myth — European — and not particularly engaging or relatable.

Of course it’s not intended for me. But having spent a few years puzzling over what children under my roof were consuming and what they were getting out of it, I can’t say “Hilda” is anything more than a well-intentioned mixed bag of children’s entertainment.

The movie may wrap things up, but you can’t come into it without having a little taste of Hilda first. And I’m not sure even that enriches what “Hilda and the Mountain King” has to offer enough to endorse it, good intentions and Annie Awards or not.

Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: The voices of Bella Ramsey, Daisy Haggard, John Hopkins,
Ameerah Falzon-Ojo, Rachel August and Dino Kelly.

Credits: Directed by Andy Coyle, scripted by Stephanie Simpson, based on the books by Luke Pearson. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:25

Here we go, here it is, so on.

“The Laureate” is a biography of the “trinity” that the British poet, novelist and translator Robert Graves shared with his painter/illustrator wife, Nancy Nicholson and American poet, critic and essayist Laura Riding.

Writer-director William Nunez narrows the focus of the film to the few years this trio were together, and briefly joined by the fourth who made their “circle,” Irish poet Geoffrey Phibbs. Nunez’s thesis is that the longest-surviving Great War poet — who went on to write the best-selling “I, Claudius,” the first “Lawrence of Arabia” biography, a classic WWI memoir “Goodbye to All That” and well-regarded Latin and Greek translations of ancient texts — might not have lived to tell those tales had it not been for this restorative menage a trois during the Roaring ’20s.

As highly-strung as the whole affair was — the story is framed inside a double suicide attempt — Graves, a bisexual before that word was in common use and a sufferer of what would later be labeled post traumatic stress disorder in the trenches of France, might not have lived to write his famous later works had not the sexually-assertive and literarily-provocative Riding fan-lettered her way into their lives.

It’s a sturdy film, well-acted, but without much in the way of flash. And the TV chat show producer Nunez (“The Beat with Ari Melber”) proves a somewhat pedestrian big-screen biographer, as “The Laureate” is not as meditative and self-consciously arty as one might have liked, a sort of less salacious and utterly humorless “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” or “Henry & June.”

We meet Graves (Tom Hughes of TV’s “Victoria”) as he broods and shakes or screams off the waking nightmares of his service in the Great War. Graves, forelock of hair permanently over one eye, recites his poems in voice-over and frets to his friend and more famous contemporary Siegfried Sassoon (Timothy Renouf) that “war is not the end, but the beginning of violence.” And more’s the pity, because in the mid-20s “no one needs a ‘war poet’ any more.”

Graves is shell-shocked, broke, unemployed, married and a father. His wife and illustrator Nancy (Laura Haddock of “White Lines” and the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies) struggles to buck Mister “Yesterday’s News” up, but his issues are many and include sexual problems.

Then he hears from this America poet and critic, and they promptly invite her to move in with them.

“If you invite a serpent into your home,” Nancy narrates, “you perhaps shouldn’t be surprised if it bites you.”

Riding, played by “Glee” alumna Dianna Agron, is vivacious, assertive and all bedroom eyes when it comes to Robert, but charming and blunt with the feminist activist Nancy as well.

“Jewish girls like me are always at the bottom of the pile,” Riding complains. But she eavesdrops on their sexual struggles and even tempts their little girl — whom she’s meant to tutor — into taking dangerous risks. Riding plays the angles, surfs their social scene and hopes to be published by Robert’s friend, T.S. Eliot (Christien Anholt). Or perhaps Robert’s other publisher friend Jonathan Cape (Edward Bennett) will show an interest.

This much is certain. Riding yanked Graves out of his funk and back into writing and getting published, even as she tempted and bedded him, possibly his wife as well and certainly this Anglo-Irish poet Phibbs (Fra Fee) whom she meets and abruptly invites into their highly unorthodox jazz age “new world” living arrangement.

“If you’re not going to live with passion and instinct, you don’t belong in this new world!”

The film hews just close enough to the accepted parameters of the biographies of all involved to not merit ridicule, even if Nunez seems to take liberties here and there to sex things up a bit. Most involved lived long enough to contest and muddy the waters of their respective stories so that even the apparent double suicide attempt isn’t the only accepted explanation for two people ending up going out of the same fourth floor window.

Agron brings the sex appeal necessary for Riding to come off, Haddock is fine as the “mannish” long-suffering, lonely wife. Hughes makes just enough of impression to be convincing as a suffering but savable poet whose greatest glory would come from explaining, exploring and critiquing the poetic mind and creative process, writing he mostly did in collaboration with Riding.

But while “The Laureate” impresses here and there, there’s nothing that truly dazzles and little that sizzles, either. It’s dry and academic when a fleshier, more overtly-troubled and damaged approach to the story and the “experimenting” characters within it would have made it more memorable.

All up and down the line, from the performances to the period settings, the words that leap to mind time and again are “adequate” and “educational.” Nunez’s efforts leave the viewer with a big question to go with the many answers he provides. Was this really literary history’s most sexually lukewarm threesome?

Rating: R for sexual content, nudity and language

Cast: Dianna Agron, Tom Hughes, Fra Fee, Julian Glover,
Timothy Renouf, Christien Anholt and Laura Haddock

Credits: Scripted and directed by William Nunez. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:47