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A not-exactly-torrid, not particularly romantic “torrid romance,” “Curiosa” takes us back to 19th century Paris, when the camera and indoor plumbing were new, and sexual mores seemed in a mad rush to catch up.

This French melodrama, loosely based on the surviving writings and photos of its two principals, takes its title from a term of the day. A “Curiosa,” an opening title tells us, “is an erotic object or photograph.”

Marie, played by Noémie Merlant ( “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,”), is the oldest of three sisters, and the great beauty of the trio that includes Louise (Mathilde Warnier) and Helene (Mélodie Richard).

Family friend Pierre (Niels Schneider), flirts and keeps them under his lusty gaze, which the sisters, especially Marie, notices.

“Girls to be wed put on a show, like houses for rent awaiting buyers,” she teases (in French with English subtitles). “We can be visited. Boy not every floor.”

All of the “gentlemen” of their acquaintance fancy themselves poets and writers. Pierre’s lifestyle of the idle rich includes photography, “candid photography,” as the old Monty Python sketch winked. Pierre takes photos of nude women, and rakishly makes a point of finishing the seduction that lured them to his studio with sex.

Pierre is what they’d have called “a bounder” or “cad” in Victorian Britain. In Paris, he still flings around the word “gentleman” as if it applies to him. Marie doesn’t pick up on this, as she’s got a crush on him like every other young woman he meets.

But when stodgy, conservative and wealthy Henri (Benjamin Lavernhe) out-maneuvers Pierre when the rake is out of town, Marie is married off not to Pierre, but to one of his many “friends.” And the way the “gentlemen” handle this unpleasantness is for Pierre to have an affair with Marie, mostly at her instigation.

She runs to his arms and his bed. But as she submits to being photographed, she gradually absorbs what Pierre promises to “teach you vices you can’t even conceive.” And trying on each other’s clothes is merely the start.

But as a man who disappears on “travels” and returns with a gorgeous Algerian prostitute (Camélia Jordana), who bandies the idea of menage a trois with Marie and shows off his photo diary of “The Female Posterior” with his pals, whom he also shares his Algerian with, we wonder what Marie will sacrifice in transitioning from “conventional” to “modern.”

Lou Jeunet, who works mostly in French TV, serves up a “Madame Bovary” without the morality or tragedy of Flaubert’s novel. She and her co-writer play up the sex scenes, and although this never quite descends into “a young woman’s ‘awakening'” softcore of the “Emmanuelle” variety, that’s the general direction of things.

Pierre is something of an artist, but as he does nothing with these “candid” shots, it’s really all about sex and the pursuit of it. Marie’s in love, but miserable.

Jeunet is intent on showing a little of the kink of a stodgy belle epoch that wasn’t as moral and unsophisticated as it might have appeared.

The trouble is, that’s a given. Paris all but invented modern porn, Parisians kept their mistresses, Pierre is quick to admit “Of course I have others,” and there’s not enough of the “poor cuckold” Henri or anyone else damaged in this promiscuity to give this story a tragic edge.

It’s all very civilized and oh-so-French. But frankly, for all the posh settings and lovely costumes, all the lovely nudes and copulation, “Curiosa” is a chilly, unemotional drag. And the performances do little to warm things up.

MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexually explicit

Cast: Noémie Merlant, Niels Schneider, Benjamin Lavernhe, Camélia Jordana, Amira Casar, Mathilde Warnier, Mélodie Richard

Credits: Directed by Lou Jeunet, script by Lou Jeunet and Raphaëlle Desplechin. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:40

“The Unknown Saint” is an understated, chuckle-out-loud caper comedy from Morocco. It works the deadpan side of the street, spare in its dialogue, leaning on sight gags and situational ironies. What you get is an intimate parody of a parable, a comedy content to earn smirks and knowing grins and never reach for belly laughs.

Younes Bouab plays our unnamed “Thief,” on the lam when his car breaks down in BFE, Morocco. Thinking fast, he grabs his haul and buries it on a rocky desert hilltop. He cunningly makes the buried bag look like a grave, because the man knows his culture. No self-respecting Muslim would stoop to desecrating a grave. Then the sirens wail and “Hands up!” and “On your KNEES!” commands become the film’s first words (in Arabic with English subtitles).

Some time later, the thief returns to the exact spot to collect his reward for his time in prison. Damned if the locals haven’t built a shrine to “The Unknown Saint” buried up on that hilltop.

“Are you a pilgrim?” the villagers want to know. Sick? “You came to be healed by the saint?”

His long hair and beard give everybody the wrong idea. As he rents space in the local inn and takes a shave and shearing with the eccentric yet fastidious local barber/dentist (Ahmed Yarziz), he ponders his situation. There are pilgrims at the shrine every day. The locals are sure they can be healed there.

And at night, the Guard (Abdelghani Kitab) keeps watch with his beloved Alsatian.

The thief doesn’t know that there’s a new doctor in town (Anas El Baz), and that he is quick to take up a cause of his crotchety nurse (Hasan Badidah), who loathes this shrine and the superstition it feeds. Who will see the doctor for a real ailment when they think they’ll be “cured” with thoughts and prayers and shrine visits?

And the thief could never know that the aged farmer Brahim (Mohammed Nouaimane), and his son Hassam (Bouchaib Semmak) are both desperate for rain a place where the soil “is no longer earth, just dust and rocks,” and resent the shrine for the friends it has displaced from their land.

Not knowing he has anti-shrine allies, the thief summons a cellmate (Salah Ben Saleh) whose nickname in prison was “The Brain,” but which the Thief acknowledges was given him “ironically.” Can two thieves, dressed in black, pull off the caper of distracting or dispensing with the guard so that they can dig up the treasure buried beneath the floor?

First time feature director Alaa Eddine Aljemon finds laughs in the elaborate hand-washing ritual the barber practices, in the way the locals start to regard the guard as a hero for fending off would-be assaults on his shrine, the guard preferring his dog to the company of his “useless” little boy and the “ailments” everybody concerned brings to the new village doctor.

“I’m here for my headaches.” “How long have you had them?” “Twenty years.”

Naturally, the nurse keeps the supply of placebos stocked.

The thieves argue about how far they should go to retrieve the loot, with one willing to do what it takes and the other insisting, “I’m a thief, not a criminal.”

The slight charms here include the story’s droll unpredictability and the utterly deadpan, irony-free performances. But those charms are “slight” above all else. In the poker game that every screen comedy plays, pretty much anybody watching will spot the money — aka “laughs” — that Aljemon leaves on the table. He’s not the Moroccan Keaton, Chaplin or Jacques Tati.

But anybody still “looking for comedy in the Muslim world” can be encouraged by this offbeat and off-the-beaten-path charmer.

MPA Rating: unrated, some violence

Cast: Younes Bouab, Salah Ben Saleh, Bouchaib Semmak, Mohammed Nouaimane,
Anas El Baz, Abdelghani Kitab, Hasan Badidah, Ahmed Yarziz

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alaa Eddine Aljemon. An A-One Films/Match Factory release, on Netflix.

Running time: 1:40

“Snake Eyes” is quintessentially that deflating moment when a bad guy or gal — or a good guy etc. — hisses “This isn’t over.” And your heart sinks because of how dismayingly dull the movie’s been up to that point, with the threat of more to come.

This G.I. Joe universe “origin story” has so little going for it that you give yourself a headache wondering “Who thought this was a good idea?”

This isn’t fan-generated “Give us RYAN REYNOLDS as DEADPOOL,” or anything the universe ordained, just an outgrowth of a Hasbro toy/comic book/TV cartoon property that’s produced crap movies that made money. Somehow.

The screenplay gives us yet another tale of a boy who “sees his father killed” — Google that phrase — and who vows revenge on the killer, after he grows up and becomes Henry Golding of “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Gentlemen.”

All the kid remembers is that Dad’s killer (Samuel Finzi) stole his overcoat from Elton John and made his father roll a pair of dice to decide his fate. But that keeps the lad going for decades, getting by as a bare knuckle, underground MMA brawler.

Seen that before, maybe sixty times? Google that, too.

Snake Eyes throws in with a yakuza thug (Takehiro Hira), then with a young heir (Andrew Koji) to a Japanese ninja clan, all with an idea of finishing the job of tracking down the Eastern European who rolled the dice and executed his father.

We’re treated to derivative, sleep-inducing “tests” that might allow admission to the clan and intrigues and double-crosses that eventually introduce assorted G.I. Joe characters —
Úrsula Corberó is the Baroness, Samara Weaving is Scarlett.

Snake Eyes appears to be a ninja in training in some scenes, and some supernaturally-gifted master of martial arts and Bugs Bunny physics in many others. Is he a pupil of “Hard Master” (Iko Uwais, not bad) and “Blind Master” (Peter Mensah) or not?

A magical talisman sits at the end of the rainbow — or locked in a super-secure vault in a building no one bothers to lock.

If this picture had anything to it, it might have furthered Golding’s transition from sensitive romantic lead to tough guy. It doesn’t. He manages the fight choreography well enough, and looks at home on the assorted seriously-sharp electric motorcycles (and cars) trotted out for product placement purposes.

What kind of whisky do the villains drink? Stay for the after-credits teaser for that.

Blase villains and seriously underwhelming supporting players flesh out a supporting cast that is in no danger of upstaging our lead.

Sorry for any feelings that get hurt over this, but as source material goes, this feeble-minded garbage makes even the weakest “comic book movie” seem like a loving adaptation of a literary classic.

There isn’t an original idea in “Snake Eyes,” so even if the first big brawl is cool enough to give one false hope, the puerile story leaves our star and the director of “RED” (and “R.I.P.D.”) nowhere to go, even on a cool, whining electric street bike. 

Pretty much from the get-go, “Snake Eyes” craps out.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and brief strong language

Cast: Henry Golding, Haruka Abe, Samara Weaving, Andrew Koji, Peter Mensah, Samuel Finzi

Credits: Directed by Robert Schwentke, script by Evan Spiliotopoulus, Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:01

Aug. 20 this thriller rolls out. Looks messy and maybe…fun?

Reviews are embargoed until 7pm Aug. 19. Make what you will of that.

Wow. Did not see THAT coming.

The German hijacking thriller “Blood Red Sky” hides its hand so well early on that it’d be a shame to give much of that away. The surprises have a grim delight about them, the violence a righteous, maternal fury.

It’s a clever blend of over-the-top supernatural and “work the problem” logical. It’s well-acted, harrowing and violent. And every now and then, this absurd German thriller is more fun than it has any right to be.

The framing device is a hijacking that’s just ended, the transatlantic jetliner, piloted by a passenger, has touched down in Scotland. There are hijackers still on board, but a little boy   (Carl Anton Koch) slips off before the hijackers start negotiating.

And boy, does he have a story to tell. Only he’s not speaking.

A long flashback shows how young Elias boarded the plane with his sickly mother
(Peri Baumeister of “The Last Kingdom”). We’ve seen her don the wig, seen her Skype with a New York doctor. They’re flying from Germany to America for treatment.

The mid-flight assault itself is brutal and coordinated. The hijackers know how to “out” air marshals and aren’t shy about spilling blood. There are “crew members” in on it. There’s a “frame-up” planned.

The leader (Dominic Purcell) is pitiless. But his gang includes at least one psychopath (Alexander Scheer). Let’s call him “Eightball.”

The passengers panic and weep and submit and can’t reason out what the villains’ motive or end game is.

“Our one demand is strictly monetary,” the leader purrs, after the first killings. The passengers have their doubts.

“Everything is fine, sweetie,” Mom assures Elias. He doesn’t believe her. He’s a smart kid trying to form his own escape plan.

And the villains? They haven’t reckoned on sickly Momma Nadja. They haven’t seen her flashback-within-the-flashback. They don’t know she’s been through worse. And now it’s not her trapped in a jetliner with them, it’s a gang of brutes trapped onboard with one fiercely protective Mama.

Director and co-writer Peter Thorwarth, best known for the cautionary parable “The Wave” (a high school exercise in how Nazis take over), and co-writer Stefan Holtz (they did “Not My Day” together) work the genre conventions to contrive their screenplay’s obstacles, and the characters’ solutions to those.

There’s an efficiency that settles in and manifests itself through the problems and the problem solving. The viewer is in on it, because we “get” the genre conventions they’re playing around with, we know why X, Y or Z as a counter-measure will work.

And Baumeister, playing the struggle of maternal instincts vs. more base and horrific impulses, is terrific as Nadja. There is pathos and power, fury and fatalism in this tightly-coiled turn.

Sorry for being so cryptic, but the first big “reveal” here is a winner, and best served cold. Suffice it to say that this is a lot closer to “Snakes on a Plane” or “Into the Night” than “Flightplan” or “Die Hard 2.” Kind of a send-up, but serious as a heart-attack.

If gory genre pics with subtitles (its in German and English with subtitles, or dubbed into English) don’t scare you off, “Blood Red Sky” could be just the ticket.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Peri Baumeister, Carl Anton Koch, Alexander Scheer, Kais Setti, Graham McTavish and Dominic Purcell

Credits: Directed by Peter Thorwarth, script by Stefan Holtz and Peter Horwath.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:03

No Kyle. No Sting. No Lynch.

This is not your Mom’s “Dune.”

The third crack at Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic may be the one that delivers its desert planet pre George Lucas, its neo Arabic/Bedouin arid life in space novelty.

“The Five Rules of Success” is a compact, artful and blunt take on an ex-con’s life “outside,” re-entering a world tempered by violence and fraught with the perils of recidivism.

Writer/director/cinematographer and co-editor Orson Oblowitz immerses us in a very-indie drama that covers familiar ground with gritty style and feverish flourishes.

We meet out unnamed “hero” (Santiago Segura) on the day he gets out of Chino, his every worldly possession stuffed into a single cardboard box.

He has a probation officer (Isadora Goreshter) who is full of warnings and reminders that “parole is a privilege… consider yourself on prison vacation, for now.”

He gets an apartment and buys a mattress for the floor. And he lands a job making deliveries for the Olympus, a Greek restaurant owned by a Greek (Jon Sklaroff) willing to give a con a chance, with the “first time you mess up” threat built in.

This is life with zero margin for error.

But this ex-con has plans, and a means of recording his self-motivational musings, “rules of success.” “Rule I), Aim High, be delusional…Rule III), Manifest Goals into Reality: Focus, discipline and perseverance.” He has “Solve et coagula,” a Latin expression for something that must be broken down before they can be built anew.

Our hero faces many obstacles and temptations, such as customers who stiff him on their deliveries, shoving drugs in his hands for payment. His probation officer is drunk on her power, threatening him at every turn. And the boss’s son (Jonathan Howard), a cook at the restaurant, is straight-up bad news, a bad influence who does drugs and runs “errands” for a local gangster (Roger Guenveur Smith).

And then there’s the hero’s haunted past, flashbacks that start as a blur of violence and eventually coalesce into a depressingly familiar “How he got here” story.

The acting is solid, the settings seamy and the messaging both surprising and poignant.

Oblowitz weaves all this into a rough-cut but seamless stream-of-consciousness narrative, taking us into a life lived as a post-prison parable, every familiar pitfall rendered into something fresh, hard and documentary real.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug content, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Santiago Segura, Jonathan Howard, Jon Sklaroff, Isidora Goreshter and Roger Guenveur Smith.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Orson Oblowitz. An Ambassador Film release (on Amazon July 30).

Running time: 1:23

Natalie Morales and Mark Duplass co-wrote and co-star this September comedy (Morales directed) about a Spanish teacher and her semi-goof of a student.

Geuss who plays which role?

Hey, I laughed.

“Old” begins as mysterious, creepy and filled with the foreboding — that sense that some “gotcha” is coming — that is M. Night Shyamalan’s brand.

Immaculate camera compositions, a beautiful but forbidding isolated beach location in a digitally-augmented Dominican Republic maintain the edgy and elegiac mood of this sci-fi fantasy meditation on aging.

Well, that’s what it aims to be, right up to the most laughably clumsy “explainer” of a third act that Shyamalan has ever served up.

“Old,” adapted from a French graphic novel, has a “Six Characters in Search of an Author” (Pirandello) or “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (Serling) set-up. As our disparate collection of strangers — eight adults and three children — struggle with the supernatural trap they find themselves in, we see their characters and their weaknesses, physical and mental.

And little by little, they lose pieces of the lives they’ve lived and the bodies they’ve enjoyed. Their world and their experience of it shrinks and is overwhelmed with loss. Because that’s what getting “old” does to you.

Our anchor family is the married couple Prisca (Vicky Krieps of “The Last Vermeer” and “Phantom Thread”) and insurance actuarial Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal), their precocious six-year old son Trent (Nolan River) and tweenage daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton). Prisca, a historical museum curator, found this “version of paradise” resort on the Internet.

As a little something extra, they’re dropped off at this remote, almost inaccessible beach by a not-helpful-enough driver (M. Night’s cameo). Another couple, a surgeon (Rufus Sewell) and his self-aware trophy wife (Abby Lee), his elderly mother and their tiny daughter, are with them.

And they’re joined by another couple — psychotherapist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and her nurse-husband Jiran (Ken Leung).

The man who was already there when they all arrived, brooding in the shade of the cliff? Young Maddox IDs him as Mid-Sized Sedan Aaron Pierre), a rapper.

When the skinny-dipping blonde who came with Me. Sedan to this beach turns up as a floating corpse, their idyll is interrupted. And just as the doctor is revealing himself as paranoid, actuary Guy is calculating the “odds” of the accident that must have killed her and everybody is figuring out that there’s no cell service here, Prisca shouts “Could you take a look at my son?”

Her boy has aged…years. Her daughter is busting out of her tween swimsuit. And when anyone tries to dash out to call for help, they black out. Someone or something is keeping them here, and days are passing in seconds, years in a matter of hours.

The veteran Brit Sewell (last seen in “Judy” and “The Father” and “The Man in the High Castle”) always makes a good villain, Bernal (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) shows off his vulnerability and Krieps impresses as a wife trying to adjust to an alarming new reality in the middle of an old reality that was about to tear her world apart.

There are semi-intentional laughs as the three children age into their hormonal years (Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie and Eliza Scanlan step in the roles), but Shyamalan (“Sixth Sense,” Signs,” “The Village”) does a good job of keeping the viewer in the moment, not leaving much dead time for us to ponder just what the hell it is we’re witnessing here.

And then he has to go and “explain” it all, breaking the spell and ruining the illusion, the elegy and any sense of profundity that this thriller with horrific touches has the pretense to aspire to.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Thomasin McKenzie, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, Abby Lee, Aaron Pierre, Embeth Davidtz, Francesca Eastwood and Alex Wolff

Credits: Scripted and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, based on a graphic novel by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters A Universal release.

Running time: 1:48

“Cosmic Sin” is a fine example of how much science fiction you can put on the screen these days, even after paying Frank Grillo and Bruce Willis took most of your budget.

It’s not a “fine example” of anything else.

A 500 years in the future “first contact” alien war tale, it’s more or less the worst shoot-em-up video game you’ve ever played.

And Willis? He’s a disgraced military leader, an exemplar of “It takes a monster to kill a monster” rationalization.

“The old suit’s a little tight,” his scientist ex (Perrey Reeves) notes.

“Needs a little more paint, just like me,” General Ford (Willis) cracks.

That’s about it for his “performance” here. His character is summoned as the only man ever to use “the Q-bomb” on a civilian population, during wars against rebellious Earth colonies years ago.

The Q-Bomb? The same one that Dr. Kokintz invented in the 1950s Cold War satire “The Mouse that Roared?” No? I digress.

Aliens who take possession of human hosts are the target here. That saves money on CGI and alien makeup. A little Goth pancake, Johnny Depp black hair-dye, and we’re good.

“Mankind mastered ballistics, their species mastered biology” Dr. Lea (Reeves) reasons.

“Everything’s gonna be OK. The good guys are here, now.” Sure, we’re buying it.

I like the quasi-“Blade Runner” future that director and co-writer Edward Drake and his designers cooked up. Robot bartenders, holographic honky tonk bands on a digital stage, “quantum gates” and “Iron Army” soldiers all suited up like Iron Man, zipping through space and hitting the beaches on faraway planets to bring the fight to the enemy in Operation Cosmic Sin.

Then there’s the fact that everybody’s still packing semi-automatic pistols and Grillo’s General Ryle still drives an F-150 — in 2524.

The dialogue is still riddled “It is what it is,” meaning sports radio nerd Mike Greenberg must still be on the air.

Combat jargon is of the “Do you think aliens have music? Will they pay my bar-tab?” and “Let’s go merc some aliens” variety.

“Let nobody accuse you of being a poet.” Exactly.

And in a career steadily more weighed down with embarrassing credits, Willis squints occasionally to prove that he’s not actually sleep-walking through this.

MPA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and violence

Cast: Frank Grillo, Bruce Willis, Perrey Reeves, Brandon Thomas Lee, Corey Large, C.J. Perry and Costas Mandylor

Credits: Directed by Edward Drake, script by Edward Drake, Corey Large. A Saban Films release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:28