Movie Nation

If you’re determined to conjure up a new Western, you could do worse than borrowing from a couple of classics.

Start by throwing in a stagecoach and its assorted passengers from the Ur Western, “Stagecoach.” Stage your climax, drawn out “Mexican Stand-Off” style, straight out of “Rio Bravo.”

Be to sure add that burning question of every “Let’s give the good guys as easy an easy out” screenwriter in the genre.

“Got any dynamite?”

And fill the screen with “types” — an ancient freight waggoneer, a crack shot old coot, a whole family that’s gone bad and a young gun that scares even them.

“Last Shoot Out” doesn’t exactly live up to the promise of its title. The shoot-outs are pale imitations of even the lamest B-Westerns of late era syndicated TV — “Guns of Paradise” comes to mind.

The plot is straight-up formula, the dialogue either cornpone without the polish or tin-eared and anachronistic.

I don’t think we ever heard Hank or the Duke, Mitchum or Randolph Scott complain, “I think I’m concussed!”

Still, it’s a well-costumed and properly set sagebrush stand-off with a mostly-unknown cast, but with two well-known villains.

Screen legend Bruce Dern is the patriarch of the Callahans, “a pretty rough bunch” one and all agree, and Dern — the villain who famously killed John Wayne in “The Cowboys” — always gives good value, even in his twilight years.

Cam Gigandet plays his tougher, older son.

And as is the way of low-low budget fare, the “names” have limited scenes (shot in a few days) and less to say and do than the unknown leads. Pity.

Skylar Witte plays the bride, fleeing marriage into a clan that she realizes gunned-down her daddy. Peter Sherayko is Red, the freight wagon driver who spies her, down to her dust-covered bloomers, out on the trail. And Brock Harris is a “kid” named “Billy,” fast with a gun and notorious for that, a passenger

They face fast-gin Sid (Gigandet) and his man Twigs (Jay Pickett) over Jocelyn, the runaway bride. Somebody’s gun is sure to be shot right out of his hands. Before anybody can say “This ain’t over,” we realize this ain’t over.

There’s nothing for it but to dash to Ryker’s Station, a stage-coach stop, to hole up and get the escapee onto a northbound coach. There’ll be one coming along in a week, well after the south bound one breaks down and driver and his two passengers join the Rykers (David DeLuise, Keikilani Grune) and the bride and her protectors as the Callahans, egged on by the gutless groom, Jody (Michael Welch) bear down on them — repeatedly.

Wait for it. Wait. Wait...”Got any dynamite?”

The first fatal flaw to pop up is the “five days earlier” and “two days later” and so on inter-titles that show up on screen. A compressed time-frame sets up a ticking-clock thriller, with rising suspense as the heroes try to run out the clock and the villains try to beat it. Think “3:10 to Yuma” and the like.

Director Michael Feifer and screenwriter Lee Martin serve up a slow jam of a Western with no “jam” to it. The picture walks when it should sprint, or at the very least canter. It’s deathly slow.

The topline cast is a pretty tepid bunch, the “drama” strictly pro forma. Brock Burnett plays a cowardly clothing salesman coach-passenger who doesn’t want to “get involved, everybody else, womenfolk included, is quick to declare her or his firearm bonafides.

The action, the actual shoot-outs, are weak tea. There’s little drama or suspense to these scenes, and even the violence can seem arm’s length removed. Characters with alleged military experience have never been taught or at least seen other Westerns where the phrase “COVER me” came up. Everybody’s a crack shot and yet most are reluctant to shoot, even to pin down the riflemen picking off this or that character. Not that many good guys have to worry about that.

The whole affair has a very consistent look, as if every scene was filmed at about ten in the morning. One twilight exchange of fire has outside footage that doesn’t match the harsh broad daylight piercing the cracks in the walls and roof of Ryker’s Station.

If you want to get your stars out to that remote coach station, you have to give them a shed to shoot from, so that they don’t dehydrate or get too much sun. Dern’s getting on up there, after all. The man guest-starred on “Gunsmoke,” for Pete’s sake.

But at least he’s in here, ornery as ever, giving fair value even if his dialogue isn’t quotable in the least. If this turns out to be his last Western, his “Last Shoot Out,” the old coot does what he always has. He gets out unscathed, never embarrassing himself.

Rating: PG-13 for violence and bloody images

Cast: Brock Harris, Skylar Witte, Peter Sherayko, Jay Pickett, David DeLuise, Caia Coley, Keikilani Grune, Larry Bestpitch, Larry Poole, Cam Gigandet and Bruce Dern

Credits: Directed by Michael Feifer, scripted by Lee Martin. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:26

This seems fraught, potentially irresponsible, and it opens Jan 21.

That darned Queen Latifah is in this tale of a new poor kid in town, a caged tiger in Kentucky and the idea of letting it go.

At least the Kentucky/Ohio “creeps who keep tigers in cages” geography is accurate.Y

Yes, these folks, often on total disability, are all over Florida too.

With “The Hand of God,” the great Neopolitan filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino turns his back — briefly — on the colorful tales of official corruption in his native land that made “Il Divo” and “Loro” so fascinating that they made his reputation.

He cashed a Netflix check and set out to make a semi-autobiographical fantasy, a movie about growing up in Naples in the Age of Maradona, when the Argentine soccer star arrived in impoverished, crime-and-corruption-ridden “Napoli” and made the locals forget their plight for a few years in the mid-80s.

But the film, which takes its title from an infamous “hand-ball” goal by Maradona in the 1986 World Cup, isn’t so much biography as a mash-up of many other such “origin” tales from other filmmakers. There are Fellini-esque touches and Fellini-esque grotesques, a little “Cinema Paradiso” here, a hint of Truffaut there.

It’s a long but watchable amble through a colorful place and time, with the time filmed through a distorted lens. A young soccer fan recalls a voluptuous but “crazy” aunt, huge family luncheons under the grape arbors of a hillside villa, a nascent filmmaker “talking” about pursuing a life in the cinema, hanging with family and friendly criminals, all of them living in breathless anticipation mixed with “He’ll never come here” despair over Diego Maradona’s destination after being all but run out of Barcelona in 1984.

The film lacks much in the way of cohesion or narrative drive. And there’s an “all these bourgeois filmmakers have the same origin story” vibe to it, thanks to its generic over-familiarity. But if you’re a fan, it’s worth a look, if not your full attention.

Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti) is the adored younger son of whimsical “communist” banker Saverio (Toni Servillo) and playful practical-joker Maria (Teresa Saponangelo). He’s in his mid-teens, and he seems to take in everything.

Such as the aftermath of the film’s opening scene. His braless bombshell aunt (Luisa Ranieri) is plucked from a bus stop and the surrounding traffic jam by a rich old man in an ancient Rolls Royce. He takes her to his dilapidated mansion where he addresses her inability to conceive with a blessing from “The Little Monk” and a slap on the rump.

Her enraged husband sees the cash stuffed in her purse and beats her, not for the first time. She’s “turning tricks again.” Fabie is the only member of the family, which rushes over to intervene, to believe her. That creates a bond that we’re reminded of in their future encounters. “Crazy” or not, Aunt Patrizia is a stunner and isn’t shy about stripping down to prove it.

Fabie’s life is a tangle of family and more distant relations, neighbors whom his mother loves to prank, of casual lawlessness that’s tolerated even in polite society and only rarely interfered with by the police, on land or on the sparkling blue smuggler’s waters of the Gulf of Naples.

His father is his guide through all this, but our guide — writer-director Sorrentino — falls down on the job, time and again. He makes little effort to help the viewer keep all these old and morbidly-obese women and men, aunts, uncles and cousins straight. As Sorrentino also messes around with the timeline of events that Fabie witnesses — Maradona’s triumphs are all out of order, meeting a famous filmmaker who didn’t begin directing until the ’90s — “details” like that aren’t meant to matter.

Fabie tags along on brother Marchino’s (Marlon Joubert) audition to be an extra, a guy entirely too “normal” looking to fit in with Fellini’s affection for circus “freaks” and the like, who fill the waiting room.

It’s football that throws Fabie in with Armando (Biagio Manna), a bluff but amusing brute of a cigarette smuggler (by boat) who takes the kid under his wing.

And there’s also third act mentor, a Neopolitan filmmaker, Antonio Capuono, who bullies and blusters and shoots a fanciful film in the streets at night.

“Got a story to tell,” the always-shouting Capuono (Ciro Capano) explodes, in Italian with English subtitles. “Have some GUTS!”

But one wonders about Sorrentino’s “guts” here. He’s pieced together a slice-of-life growing up in Naples picturebook — complete with a tragedy that isn’t handled all that tragically, a few chuckles and a visit to a nude beach.

The kid is more of a place-holder than any compelling center to the film. And none of the supporting characters, from an actress relative to the “crazy” aunt to his brother or the cigarette smuggler Armando, is developed enough to make a difference.

Settling on “futbol” as an organizing principle seems an afterthought, much like showing Maradona’s titular goal before he signs with Naples.

As random as it all is, “The Hand of God” does add up to a “movie” in the broadest sense, just not a very coherent or interesting one.

If there’s a hallmark to pretty much all of Netflix’s flirtations with great filmmakers, it’s “indulgent” and “flaccid” films that spare no expense turning out that way.

Rating: R for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use.

Cast: Filippo Scotti, Teresa Saponangelo, Toni Servillo, Luisa Ranieri, Biagio Manna and Ciro Capano,
Marlon Joubert

Credits: Scripted and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:10

Lance Henriksen, Baron of B-movies and Tsar of the Cs, lends a little in-on-the-joke twinkle to “Alpha Rift,” a silly and unexceptional sword-and-sorcery tale that doesn’t skimp on the cheese.

Henricksen presides over this “heir to the bloodline” warrior against evil tale anchored in Nerdland, amongst the role-players, cosplayers and D&D folk who love their “lore,” “legends” and “origin stories.”

It’s got a flippant attitude, recycled one-liners and more hams than Smithfield. But if you’re on its wavelength…

Veteran bit player Aaron Dalla Villa has the lead role, playing Nolan, a gaming store proprietor “chosen” for one of the Helmets of the Noblemen, his “destiny” in a real-world showdown against evil that inspired this game he and his co-workers (Rachel Nielsen and Christopher Ullrich) are really into in his store.

Some robbers bust open a vault, looking for sellable rare coins. One of them drops this green crystal orb, green lights flash and the career-criminal known as Blades (Phillip N. Williams) now has green eyes and a new mission.

“I have been waiting in eternity for this moment!”

His rampage is why Nolan gets this helmet delivered to his store. That’s why his not-really-his-landlord (Allyson Malandra) shows up with a SWAT team with strange emblems to protect him until he listens to everyone who shouts “Put on the HELMET” at him.

Next thing he knows, this old man growling on about “your destiny” (Henriksen) and a fellow named “Gerard the Butler” and others are training him for the fights to come. He will be initiated into a real life “Knights of the Noblemen.” His fave game? Not just “a fairytale” or “legend.”

“Knights of the Noblemen,” BTW? Stupid, redundant name, even for a fantasy game in a C-movie about said fantasy game.

The dialogue is a whole lot of “Ninjas, are you friggin’ KIDDING me?” and “I’ll see you in Hell!” “Already been there!”

Henriksen lends a raised-eyebrow gravitas, inspiring “Is this the part where you tell me my flesh tastes better with chianti and fava beans?”

The dialogue is “no time for another take” agrammatical at times, rehashed and recycled and cut-and-pasted-from-other-movies in others. Bad puns follow the bad guy, who doesn’t like being compared to somebody from a trilogy he never read.

“Who is this ‘Sorry Man’ (Saruman) of which you speak?”

Williams and Henriksen are the best things in it. The acting is nothing to put on anybody’s demo reel, although the modest effects are OK, somewhat more convincing than the fight choreography.

“Alpha Rift” is nonsense, and everybody involves knows it, which is a plus. I just wish it had been funnier and tighter. The intended laughs just aren’t there, not enough of them anyway.

Rating: PG-13 for violence, language and suggestive references

Cast: Lance Henriksen, Aaron Dalla Villa, Rachel Nielsen, Philip N. Williams, Christopher Ullrich and Peter Patrikios

Credits:Scripted and directed by Dan Lantz. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:34

I wasn’t going to review this damned movie.

It was pitched as “streaming” and “coming out” this week, but it turns out it dates from 2009 and some distributor decided it’d try to wring some more cash out of it under a new title. Even in the dubious ethics of PR and movie marketing, that’s not cricket.

“American Primitive” it used to be called, an apt title for a a period piece about the Everybody’s in the Closet era of North American homosexuality.

“Wild About Harry” is not just a classic pub sing-along tune, it’s what his lover pounds out at the piano to his “American Primitive” (pre-“shabby chic”) furniture business partner and other half in the film. Not subtle.

This is the sort of LGBT arcana that belongs on Netflix and Tubi and perhaps that’s where it’ll be soon. It’s too sweet to be discarded, too quaint and dated (even in 2009, when it made the festival rounds) to pull in prospective ticket buyers. But it’s well cast and charmingly-set on Cape Cod in 1973.

Tate Donovan has the title role, a widowed father of two daughters — Maddie (Danielle Savre, who went on to “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Station 19” on TV) and her bouncy, naive little sister Daisy (Skye McCole Bartusiak, who tragically died five years after this was made).

An animated prologue has Dad narrating the “fraternity prank” that led him to their late mother. But when we meet them, they’re moving to a Cape Cod cottage that has a workshop and retail space built into it.

Harry Goodheart is starting over. For the girls, that means trying to fit in at a new high school. For Harry, that means a new business with his new “partner,” Mr. Gibb (Adam Pascal), who will live in the bedroom out behind the workshop.

Maddie is a little curious about this sudden development/arrangement. . Daisy doesn’t give it a second thought on her way out the door to catch the bus.

“Have fun with Mister Gibb!”

The new school adjustment tropes play out according to formula. Maddie catches the eye of school hunk Sam (Corey Sevier), who suggests she go out for the tennis team, even though she didn’t bring a racket or the right clothes. Scorching the team’s star rich girl and cheer captain in bell bottoms and clogs isn’t going to make her many friends, and what that says about Cape Cod tennis in 1973 speaks volumes.

Maddie also catches the eye of the stubble-bearded, stocking-capped rebel Spoke (Josh Peck, a bit old for this part, even in 2009).

But no hard feelings. We’ll pick you up tonight. Let’s all go to The Atlantic House!

Damned if these teens aren’t hitting the best place to dance in much of America at the time, a local gay bar. Damned if Maddie doesn’t see Dad and Mr. Gibb working it on the crowded dance floor. She flips out, but quietly.

Researching gay “conversion/aversion” therapy in the library, leaning into the flirtatious, “Let’s help you meet someone nice” neighbor, Mrs. Brown (Anne Ramsey, the funniest player on TV’s “Mad About You”), dropping hints and throwing up obstacles to Dad and his beau being together becomes Maddie’s life.

Daisy? She has no more of a clue than Mrs. Brown, whose party full of “available” women loses itself in a sing-along with Mr. Gibb, who shows up and leads the house in a rousing “I’m just wild about HA-rrrrrry.”

One of the “prospects” is a local newspaper reporter, played with a pre-Trumpist verve by Stacey Dash. She’s determined to do a profile of the new neighbors/new business, even as her questions get “That’s a bit PERSONAL” from Harry. So he dates and kisses her just to throw her off the scent.

Ok, that’s funny. As is the song, every time it comes back up.

And there’s a light touch to Daisy’s naivete that is nicely contrasted to Maddie’s increasingly shrill campaign, worried about what “people will say.” Maddie even summons her late mother’s parents (Susan Anspach and James Sikking). But they can’t resist Mr. Gibb’s piano playing any more than anyone else.

Donovan, who’d get a modest career bounce out of “Argo” a few years later, beautifully channels the ’70s “gay and in hiding” vibe, a man who hisses “Don’t SAY that WORD” to Gibb when he refers to them as “homosexuals.”

“A homosexual is a man who goes around having anonymous sex in bathhouses,” which was certainly the image attached to gay men in the era. Any TV show of the day, from “All in the Family” to “Taxi,” that had episodes touching on this subject covered it in the same serio-comic way.

“Who knew?” was kind of a punchline in TV and film back then, an improvement over the “tragedy” that hung over homosexuals on film and TV in the ’60s, but still a long way from Ellen DeGeneres, Pete Buttigieg and today.

“Wild About Harry,” co-written by Mary Beth Fielder and director Gwen Wynne, does a decent job at capturing a moment in time and being entertaining about it.

Maybe gay “bad old closeted days” nostalgia could become a thing, even though it hadn’t in 2009, when “Wild About Harry” was an “American Primitive” that no one was buying.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual material and language

Cast: Tate Donovan, Danielle Savre, Skye McCole Bartusiak, Adam Pascal, Josh Peck and Anne Ramsey

Credits: Directed by Gwen Wynne, scripted by Mary Beth Fielder and Gwen Wynne. A Global Digital/Freestyle release.

Running time: 1″@3

It takes a while for someone to ask the vacationing literary professor Leda the obvious question.

“Are you angry? You seem angry.”

Leda may be on a long vacation on a seemingly idyllic Italian isle. But she always seems on the edge of something — a testy rebuff, a huff, maybe tears or at the very least an inappropriate sexual double entendre.

As played by Oscar-winner Olivia Colman in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s film, “The Lost Daughter,” Leda is a kindred spirit to a lot of Gyllenhaal characters over the years — a woman capable of things. Leda is smart and sexual, aloof and tetchy, not the sort to take kindly to an imposition or thoughtless request from the mob of Italian and New York Italian-American boors who noisily bowl onto “her” beach, her walk or her night at the cinema.

In Gyllenhaal’s directing debut, adapting Elena Ferrante’s novel, we fear Leda and fear for her. Because she has a hard edge — very hard. And these interlopers? They’re “bad people.” They don’t flinch at her furious professorial dismissals or profane working-class Leeds bark.

That’s not what “The Lost Daughter” is about, but it’s the subtext, a general unease that this subtle and unsettling film’s story unfolds against.

Proust’s narrator in “Remembrance of Thing’s Past” is triggered by a Madeleine cake. For Leda, it’s the sight of a beautiful, distracted and overwhelmed young mother from Queens (Dakota Johnson) whose needy, clingy toddler wanders off, throwing her entire Jersey-Shore-ready entourage into a panic.

Leda finds the child, and the wincing reveries that seeing Nina frantic or bickering profanely with her sinister lout of a husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) take her back to a time she lost her own daughter at the beach.

In flashbacks, we see young Leda (Jessie Buckley of “Wild Rose” and “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”), struggling to make time for herself, master Italian and write, with two young daughters who will not give her a moment’s peace. Leda didn’t handle that gracefully, and we wonder how this not-exactly-“instinctual” mother made out with them and what might have happened.

When present day Leda finds the little girl and returns her to her mother, we piece together more of her state of mind. She’s already noted “Children are a crushing responsibility” to a pregnant Queens queen (Dagmara Dominczyk). Now when Nina tells her she’s grappling with “something I just can’t handle,” Leda’s pithy response speaks volumes, two words of harsh judgment and naked confession.

“I know.“

Nina doesn’t see Leda make off with her little girl’s prized doll. That brittle exterior doesn’t so much hide the cruel streak we suspect lies beneath as make us anticipate it.

Gyllenhaal skillfully tracks Leda through this world, keeping her “I’d like to get back to my dinner now” distance from the friendly old caretaker of her rental house (Ed Harris), cozying up to beach cabana employee Will (Paul Mescal) to obtain a little adult literary conversation, with the odd sexual innuendo, from a college boy.

Colman gives an edge to almost every moment she’s on screen. Something about the nature of her chats with Will suggests this is standard operating procedure for our Boston professor.

We can’t know what her intentions are for that doll, but taking it doesn’t seem “normal” in any way, even as simple revenge for these cretins ruining her tranquility.

Johnson and especially Dominiczyk (TV’s “Succession”) have an element of danger about them that makes them seem at home in their rough extended family. Their questions of Leda have an interrogatory quality — part mother (or prospective mother) to mother bonding, part “What kind of mother are you?” judgement, with a hint of implied threat.

And as the flashbacks progress, Buckley skillfully gives us more and more of the young mother who became this often mean middle-aged woman.

Events play out in ways that can seem random, the “puzzle” of the picture is that cryptic.

“The Lost Daughter” isn’t melodramatic. But it uses the threat of melodrama — a touch of menace, glimpses of past callousness and cruelty, a flirtation in the present day, an affair (Gyllenhaal’s husband Peter Sarsgaard plays a bearded, vivacious fellow professor) — to keep us on our heels, on tenterhooks as we fret over all the bad things that might happen or terrible things that must have happened.

Colman’s performance is the film’s marvel. But Gyllenhaal’s brilliant, subtle manipulations make hers one of the most auspicious directing debuts in years, a veteran, intimidating cinematic “bad girl” who turns her withering gaze on us and strings us along, wondering what became of “The Lost Daughter.”

Rating:  R for sexual content/nudity and language

Cast: Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, Dagmara Dominczyk, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Ed Harris and Peter Sarsgaard

Credits: Scripted and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on a novel by Elena Ferrante. A Netflix (Dec. 31) release.

Running time: 2:01

This Jan 21 release is based on a spy novel about a “document” the British PM reviled by history for “appeasement” needs to counter Adolf Hitler’s bluster and lies.

There’s a too-skinny Hitler, and George Mackay (“1917”) also in the cast. Looks pretty good, in that “13 Minutes” almost-changing history sense.

There have been legions of compelling documentaries about the harrowing nature of the refugee experience, fleeing conflict and persecution from the world’s most dangerous places.

One excellent real-people/real footage film that follows a family through all it takes to escape Afghanistan and get into Europe was “Midnight Traveler.” But one thing most such films lack is a way of capturing the back story, letting us see lives that weren’t being documented, dangerous encounters with soldiers or police and the like.

Filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen gets around that rather ingeniously with “Flee,” a “Waltzes with Bashir” animated documentary built on the filmmaker’s interviews with his subject, a man who fled Afghanistan as a child, who made it to Denmark and who gives a guarded audio memoir in response to Rasmussen’s questions.

A team of animators artfully sketch in the world the man who goes by “Amin” in the film remembers, the ordeals he and his family endures, the trauma that left him guarded, almost paranoid, but a survivor, now an academic, able to tell his story to the world.

The “Amin” we hear from in the film, in sessions depicted as almost psychotherapeutic — he lies on a sofa, at times — is a 40ish man with survivor’s guilt, a lingering sense of a refugee’s desperation and an almost primal sense of self-preservation.

He was told to lie to get out, to escape the “sanctuary” of Russia after his family escaped Afghanistan, told to lie by the human traffickers who took multiple shots at getting him and his family to freedom in the West.

You can’t help but notice how selective he is about his background. His father was singled out by the communist regime for arrest during the years when the Soviets fought in the middle of the civil war there. He disappeared. But Amin’s family was obviously well-connected and well-off enough to get out, allowed into the former U.S.S.R., and then by hook and by crook, to make their way to Sweden and in his case, Denmark.

There are moments when Rasmussen, who has gotten to know the man and heard versions of his tale before, gently gets Amin to own up to lying, and explain why he did. We get it.

And right from the start, we know other truths from this Muslim man from the most dangerous place in the world. Even as a little boy, “I wasn’t afraid of wearing my sister’s dresses, her nightgown.”

From the time he was old enough to develop crushes on movie stars via their posters and trading cards, Amin knew he was different. He was really gone for Jean-Claude Van Damme, he says.

So here was a gay tween flown out of Afghanistan when the Mujahadeen, later to give way to the Taliban, took over. He and his family arrive in a Soviet Union that is collapsing, and face the shakedowns of the corrupt police and the hopeless dream of getting to Sweden, where an older brother has settled.

The film captures the murderous menace of Russia’s version of “coyotes,” human smugglers, men without conscience who stuff paying customers into the locked hold of a coastal trawler which breaks down well short of delivering them to Scandinavia.

And that’s just one attempt to get out.

Along the way, we get hints of the life Amin has had since escaping his past, skimming past his college years to suggest an academic career, but nothing really about how he helped get his story made into a movie.

If I’m being skeptical of this uplifting story’s facts (admittedly changed to protect the family from persecution or reprisals), it’s because of everything it leaves out. I am treating it like a documentary, which it is. And as such, it’s incomplete.

The (under-animated) animation, aside from its recreations of Amin’s childhood and the stops on his journey, is more or less a gimmick. Inserted snippets of news footage about the war, the Soviet collapse, the conditions in places where Amin was held, give the film it’s grounded veracity.

This really happened and it really happened to him, he says. It doesn’t matter that animation isn’t admissible in court. We believe him, and there’s plenty to back that up.

Some will connect with his “coming out” struggle, before that phrase has made it into his vocabulary. It’s touching, although I have to admit all the psychobabble about the trauma and created his restlessness while house shopping with his Danish partner lost me.

If this was all live-action “documentary” footage, I’d be much more inclined to gripe about all the “life” that’s skimmed over to focus more on his personal present. There’s no doubt he’s been through the ringer.

But if we you want a film that explains down to the molecular level how he got out when millions didn’t, the things “Flee” omits speak almost as loudly as the “triumph of the spirit” story he tells.

“Flee” as animated documentary is quite engrossing and sometimes even moving. But as biography, it’s barely sketched in.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, disturbing images and strong language

Cast: The voices of Amin Nawabi and Jonas Poher Rasmussen

Credits: Directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, scripted by Amin Nawabi and Jonas Poher Rasmussen .A Neon release.

Running time: 1:29

The heist-picture/zombie apocalypse thriller “Army of the Dead” left me cold. But many others warmed to it, and now there’s a Netflix series in the offing based on it.

Meanwhile, here’s the prequel that sealed that deal. “Army of Thieves” is much more of a straight-up caper comedy, with events preceding the “zombie apocalypse” that’s already happened in “Dead.”

Actually, the Vegas-born onslaught of the walking dead begins in this film, and yet as the contagion spreads and civilization stares down its doom, an “Army of Thieves” is assembled to crack the greatest collection of safes known to humankind.

No, it doesn’t make a helluva lot of sense, and yes, there are plenty of pauses to appreciate each safe (scene from inside, as its digitally-animated tumblers fall), all of them named for Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle of operas by a Master Race machinist/safe builder also named Wagner.

But the thing lopes along, jolly enough here and there, that fans of the first film almost certainly have already devoured this. I am tardy getting to it. Apologies.

The tale, directed by and starring Matthias Schweighöfer, — “Dieter” from the first film– gives us the master Katzenjammer safe-cracker’s back story, his inclusion in a “team” the sets out to crack the great safes of Europe, named “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre,” “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” after operas by Hitler’s favorite dead German composer.

 We meet Schweighöfer’s Dieter as he’s lured into an underground safecracking contest, thanks to his Youtube videos about the Great Safes of Europe. He’s a loner, an obsessive and an office drone who finds himself, after winning said contest, tempted into further “adventure” by the alluring career criminal Gwendoline (Nathalie Emmanuel).

Zombies be damned, she’s determined to knock off the Hans Wagner safes at whatever credit union, bank or casino now uses them. She wants to “go down in history” as history itself is ending, a fact conveniently ignored for pretty much the entire movie.

Well, not by the Interpol agent (Noémie Nakai) whose boss (Jonathan Cohen) is obsessed with catching this bank robbing gang, which includes getaway driver Rolph (Guz Khan), muscle in “action hero” form Brad Cage (Stuart Martin) and Portuguese super-hacker Korina (Ruby O. Fee).

“Why are we bothering with this (gang)” Interpol’s Beatriz wants to know? They should be helping stop the zombie contagion. As there is no answer that doesn’t utterly undermine the entire premise of the picture, there you go.

The heists are hyped-up with rapid-fire editing and increasingly insistent strings on the soundtrack. They cannot help but play repetitive, despite the supposed increasing degrees of difficulty.

Getting Dieter to the safes is a hassle, hearing him pontificate about “Der Ring des Nibelungen” the operas and “Der Ring” of safes every time before he “gets cracking” can be sort of tedious.

He’s a fun character, and Schweighöfer has a jolly time at portraying Dieter’s failings. He’s not tough, not modest and screams like a little girl when injured, frightened or delighted.

Where’s Dave Bautista when you need him?

The plot, conceived by Zack Snyder but scripted by Shay Hatten, tosses in missed communications, double-crosses, tough-guy and tough-gal talk and some serious kick-ass action involving Emmanuel, whose experience in “Game of Thrones” And “Furious 7” pays off as the lady is adept at fight choreography.

The cleverest visual is Dieter laying his hand on safes and being able to visualize the lock inside the metal casing as he turns those golden ears — no stethoscope needed — to opening it via the “art” of lock deciphering, no drills or dynamite required.

The “puzzles” that each safe is said to represent aren’t all that and left me cold. There are cute self-aware references about “how sometimes in a heist movie they show a flash forward,” revealing how the caper will go down if everything goes perfectly, which things never do.

There’s a lot movement and motion in Schweighöfer’s direction, which can’t hide the general inertia of this rote, formulaic and nonsensical “quest.”

Don’t think too much about well-equipped, financed and mobile these people are when there’s a global pandemic that you and I know would cause a pretty quick planetary lockdown.

And don’t be surprised at all the ways the Interpol guy is five steps behind you as the average viewer as we can all see what should be the gang’s unmasking right from the opening scenes.

It’s a more likable affair than the video-gamish “Army of the Dead.” Taking the zombies out of the equation altogether helps.

Just not enough.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Matthias Schweighöfer, Nathalie Emmanuel, Ruby O. Fee, Stuart Martin, Guz Khan, Jonathan Cohen, Noémie Nakai

Credits: Directed by Matthias Schweighöfer, scripted by Shay Hatten. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:07

Here’s a tasty peek into the overachieving, hyper-competitive and insular world of America’s affluent Indian diaspora.

“India Sweets and Spices” is a sort of “Snobby Rich Indians” comedy about a liberated activist coed coming home to the world of gossipy, shallow and acquisitive friends, family and neighbors of Ruby Hill, the swank McMansion suburb of Newark where she grew up.

To Alia — pre-med at UCLA and played by “Grey’s Anatomy” alum Sophia Ali — summer is for relaxing by the pool and judging the dickens out of the gaudy decor, gauche gossip and insufferable bragging of her parents’ circle of acquaintances — all just as affluent, each taking her turn at hosting the weekly “See my new chandelier” dinner parties.

Miss Judgy can seem a trifle superficial herself.

“I’m NOT superficial! I watch documentaries! I go to ‘spoken word.’ I use ORGANIC Chapstick!”

But self-blindness is common at that age, right? So let’s go the parties that serve as “chapters” (“Varna Party,” “Bhatia Party”) to writer-director Geeta Malik’s comic send-up of people scorned by their kids, offspring whom an earlier indie comedy labeled as “ABCD,” “American born confused-Deshi.”

And let’s watch Alia’s jaw drop at the dreamboat she sees working at the local all-things-Indian market, India Sweets and Spices. Varun (Rish Shah) may be from the retail classes. His family is the new owners of this popular, high-end store, so every time he says “poor” feel free to cringe. But liberated Alia figures these working should all come to mom’s upscale dinner party with every over-dressed designer-wearing, Lambo, Tesla or Porsche driving “friend” of her snooty, snobby parents.

Sheila (Manisha Koirala) literally looks down her nose at Varun’s mother (Deepti Gupta) who, it turns out, knew her back in the old country. They went to college together.

And Alia’s golf-obsessed sports surgeon dad (Adil Hussain) is even worse. And by “worse” I mean Alia sees him top that rudeness with something more like a betrayal.

What’s a woke coed to do? Why, throw herself at the working class lad and shun the rich pre-med hunk (Ved Sapru) who seems “chosen” for her by fate, finance and family history (their parents’ machinations).

“India Sweets” gives us two points of view, both harshly critical of an older generation that’s succeeded beyond its wildest dreams only to squander that success on consumerist nonsense and internal competition. We see Sheila’s gossipy coffee klatch and hear their constant knifing each other in the back, as if that’s their whole world.

Alia and the other kids see and hear this and roll their eyes, even as they’re the beneficiaries of all this wealth and opportunity.

“You think Indians live here?” Alia cracks to Rahu (Sapru) as they gawk at another neighbor’s “more is more” decor.

The larger if obvious point of all this is that even McMansions can be “glass houses,” and all this insular judgment and backbiting is counterproductive and not really contributing to a pluralist society’s ultimate success.

Ali makes a delightful and just-snarky-enough tour guide to this self-consciously garish world.

The film’s limited point of view has a “Crazy Rich Asians” mandate. And while it isn’t as broad and cartoonish as that — narrowing its focus to people, their houses, their parties and their gossip — it seems more firmly footed in a relatable reality. No, it’s not quite as funny.

The character arcs are predictable, as are the melodramatic twists. But there’s a humanity in the messaging, a “Can these narcissistic boors be saved?” ethos.

It’s a lot less “spice” and a bit more “sweet” than I’d care for, but Malik has made a warm comedy that introduces, embraces and every-so-gently-chides an under-represented American community in all their glory, their fun and their foibles.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, sexual material, and brief drug references

Cast: Sophia Ali, Manisha Koirala, Rish Shah, Anita Kalathara, Adil Hussain and Ved Sapru.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Geeta Malik. A Bleecker Street release (now streaming and on DVD)

Running time: 1:41