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Whatever else this fellow Will Smith — no, not THAT Will Smith — has going on in his life, he tells a helluva yarn.

And that “yarn,” about a mysterious neighbor he barely knows leaving a large and expensive stamp collection with him with an “If anything should happen to me” proviso, instantly drew in documentary filmmaker William Saunders & Co. It sent them on a four year odyssey, with Smith, to track down where these stamps came from, their value, and who this Russian accented fellow, Roman No-Last-Name might be and how he came to have them, and stash them with a near-stranger.

“The Penny Black” is an utterly-engrossing might-be-true-crime docu-mystery, a film laid out like a private eye thriller (they even hire an Archer Agency detective in LA, shades of Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer), a story with big money, competing agendas, shady characters and a classic “unreliable narrator.

I mean we think, as the filmmakers do, that we can trust this Smith fellow. But can we? The fact that he has no visible means of support in a crazily expensive city, that his dad was a document forger/embezzler and that Will uh, goes through some cash, makes us wonder.

Everything about the film — from its shadowy recreations of what could be home movies of Will’s past to the score (dulcimer plunks that sound like we’re watching an espionage thriller) — screams “Trust NO ONE,” no matter how honest they seem.

The world’s first postage stamp, a British “penny black,” is among the collectibles in the big albums that this Roman fellow dropped in Smith’s lap. According to Smith, anyway. But that 1840 marvel isn’t close to being the most valuable stamp in the collection.

“The Penny Black” lets Smith tell the strange story of how he got the stamps, and then follows efforts he (and the filmmakers) undergo to ascertain their value at stamp shows and auctions, their provenance and just where this “Roman” fellow got off to.

Smith’s matter-of-fact disclosure of how he came into possession of them all gives him a “sketchy” vibe, one that he never quite shakes as months and years go by, he moves a couple of times, takes up with and breaks up with a girlfriend and reveals “gifts” he’s received to prop him up.

“I sold a few stamps,” he jokes, reading the film crew’s mind, and ours. “A gift,” he corrects.

As the years go on and they hire that “Archer Agency” PI and track a down folks who reported a big stamp heist years back, Smith and Saunders build the unseen “missing” Roman into a Harry Lime of “The Third Man” sort of figure — larger than life.

And Smith, who rather casually dismissed the shady seeming nature of their original exchange and shrugged off any idea he might have taken possession of something that could get him arrested or killed, finally seems to fret and worry over what he’s done and what they might uncover.

“I’d hate to put myself in mortal danger over some f—–g stamps!”

Has he?

Dive into “Penny Black,” before somebody options this for a feature film noir, and find out.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity

Credits: Directed by William J. Saunders. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:38

Nov. 5, lots of new superheroes for those who need them.

Sometimes, they lose you in the finale. They over-explain their “motiveless murder” thriller, and the explanations don’t add up to anything other than “pitiless psychopath” or the filmmakers do something else to show they don’t know when to call it a day.

“Stalker” is a half-decent iteration of the popular “identify theft” thriller, starting with “pranks” and transitioning to house breaking, thefts, and utter identity destruction, all of it with a side order of murderous stalker.

It flirts with “stylish,” and is just paranoid enough — if a little slow — as we watch our new-to-California teacher/tutor (Vincent Van Horn) meet somebody nice in a bar (Christine Ko), take a rideshare back to her place, and see his life steadily unravel as the Ryde dude (Michael Lee Joplin) befriends him, clings to him and then turns on him.

Director and co-writer Tyler Savage samples all manner of ID theft horrors and pitches his movie somewhere in the “Cape Fear” to “Cable Guy” as B-movie range, switching points of view from hapless Andy (Van Horn) to predatory Roger (Joplin) as he does.

Van Horn’s Andy experiences the downward spiral of a life he’s lost control of, a wrong he cannot rectify. The performance captures a little sense of the despair (crawling into a bottle), a hint of the rage. Portraying a teacher, it’s a toned-down turn that feels something like a cheat.

The inevitable “I didn’t mean to trigger you” and Why are you doing this?” get our victim nowhere. The cops seem amused at the destructive “pranks” the apparent master criminal is able to pull on Andy. And cell phone expert gives him the “see this all the time” shrug.

“You got sim-swapped.”

All of which is set up in a workaday Los Angeles firmly rooted in reality. How would you “punish” a freelance tutor? Send him to bogus “appointments” (a drug dealer’s house) for starters.

But the “reality” and the suspense and the narrowly-defined “entertainment value” dissipates in an ending that talks its way out of any sense the story might have made and any sense of satisfaction the viewer might have hoped for.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Vincent Van Horn, Christine Ko, Michael Lee Joplin

Credits: Directed by Tyler Savage, script by Dash Hawkins, Tyler Savage. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:26

A dark comedy about serial killers and a support group, led by David Koechner.

This trailer really plays. Know why?ACTING! And we’re invested in the characters and this “Amityville” couple’s universe.

More interesting as another technical exercise in “making a movie look like your Facebook page,” “Profile” comes to screens too late to catch “ISIS Fever,” too obvious to quite come off.

I mean, if the average viewer sees things the cunning, media-savvy, nimble-fingered millennial reporter-heroine played by Valene Kane (TV’s “Gangs of London”) should see coming a mile off, the whole enterprise is undercut and fairly early on.

We “see” Amy hurriedly assembling an online identity, life and fake “profile” for a story her editor (Christine Adams, uncannily nerve-wracking) is riding her to report yesterday, if not before. It’s 2014 London, and the word wants to know why young women from all over Europe are flocking to Syria and becoming ISIS recruits, wives, concubines and/or suicide bombers.

How to report it? Lure a recruiter, engage with him in messages and Skype chats, teasing out the process of online “seduction” that ends with recruits stepping off a plane in Istanbul and into the violent, psychotic patriarchy of the Islamic State.

Amy reinvents herself as “Melody” and multi-tasks like a maniac, Youtube Hijab-wearing and “How to make yourself younger” makeup tutorials, Googling “How to make someone fall in love with you” and flipping from screen to screen, power-watching jihadist beheading videos and cutesy ISIS recruiting memes involving kittens and babies and toddlers posed with grenades, AK-47s and that omnipresent Islamic State black flag.

She’s in her mid-20s and trying to pass for 19-20, because IS fighters/martyrs like them young, virginal and gullible.

And within moments, she’s posted the right picture and shared the right memes and videos and Abu Bilel Al-Britani, a Syrian fighter/true believer and recruiter has hit her with a “Salaam alaikum, my sister.”

Juggling screens and hastily donning a hijab, she covers a death’s skull tattoo on her finger (“It’s haram (forbidden in Islam)” she’s reminded by tech guy Lou (Amir Rahimzadeh), who is hastily coaching her through recording Skype chats for her story.

Because Bilel, whose “Al-Britani” gives away his jihadi origins as surely as his accent, is on screen and giving her the full-court press in a heartbeat. He’s a bearded 20something hunk played by Shazad Latif (“The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”) with the swagger of youth and the confidence of knowing “recent convert to Islam” and “young female” should make Melody putty in his hands.

He bowls her over with videos, braggadocio over his combat experience and insistent questions, pleas and demands. Amy isn’t the age she’s saying Melody is, so she plays along, slowing his roll with her own questions and when doubt, fear, overeagerness or technical problems and interruptions kick in, she disconnects “by accident.”

She catches her breath, deals with boyfriend/realtor Matt (Morgan Watkins) who checks in via Facebook messenger, Skype or what have you updating her on the apartment they’re to move into together.

Matt is over-organized, has the math of their living arrangement worked out to the penny, propping the freelance reporter up until she can win a job at the media organization she’s risking her neck for with this story.

She creates Melody with cheats — cutting and pasting other “why I converted” narratives she finds online, “friending” lots of people she finds with the right names and profiles to suit her new persona.

It’s this manic, real-time, type-type-Skype opening act that is the best thing in “Profile,” getting at the pressure a young person in the “gig economy” feels, journalistic shortcuts, the bum’s rush Bilel is plainly giving her, urging her to “come,” professing “paradise” and promising “marriage” in a mad dash to close the deal.

Amy/Melody sees what we see and hears what we hear. She’s read the “recruiting playbook” that others have exposed online, how IS recruiters work their magic. And yet she softens towards this good-looking, committed and confident young thug who promises her a life that square Matt can’t hope to approach.

Every interaction is fraught with danger and urgency, and as little journalistic tricks enter the conversation — probing his real identity, his real job with IS, his own journey from unhappiness to radicalism — she puts off her editor and Matt and everybody else, dragging out the reporting, almost as if she’s giving this bargain some serious consideration.

The energy in Timur Bekmambetov’s latest thriller — he did “Night Watch,””Wanted,” the “Ben Hur” remake, and produced the similar online thriller “Unfriended” — dissapates almost by default after that heady first act.

Amy is still frazzled and balancing several things at once in every chat. But as the days and chats go on, could she really be falling for psycho-Lothario’s line after seeing and hearing and reading him in that first, pushy conversation? After seeing his friends murder people on camera?

“Profile,” shot in 2018, also feels dated — not in the tech sense, but in the geopolitical one. Who talks about IS any more? The hundreds of jaded, lost Westerners who flocked to Syria almost a decade ago are cultural punchlines now, those who weren’t beheaded by their overlords or arrested when they tried to come home.

Still, Bekmambetov, working from a true story in a book by Anna Érelle, expands the possibilities of what we can do in creating suspense via simple exchanged messages and Skype conversations that need to hide as much as they reveal. Amy’s mad online multi-tasking will make most viewers feel old and slow, or that an attention span is a terrible thing to waste.

Remember that John Cho thriller about a man tracking his missing daughter down via her social media history, “Searching?” This is like that, until the energy fades and the journalistic credibility slips into “women reporters, always falling for the evilest guy” stereotypes.

Like that ever happens.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout and some disturbing images 

Cast: Valene Kane, Shazad Latif, Christine Adams, Morgan Watkins, Amir Rahimzadeh

Credits: Directed by Timur Bekmambetov, script by Britt Poulton, Olga Kharina and Timur Bekmambetov, based on the book by Anna Érelle A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:40

“The exchange, “You’re putting in your own septic?” “I think I can handle it” is horrific enough to the average home or single wide owner.

June 1, this bad boy becomes accessible to mere mortals everywhere.

“The Strange House (Das schaurige Haus)” is a screwball German mystery-dramedy about kids in search of who is haunting this house some of them have moved into, and why.

Something or former someones are “possessing” two brothers, new kids in town, at times. Who are they, what are they, and what might they want from this life that their last one lost?

There’s not a lot to this, and if you’re looking for straight-up frights, you’ll be let down. But I laughed more than once at these kids trying to get answers for the unexplainable.

The neighbors give the new family — mother Sabine (Julia Koschitz), littlest son Eddi (Benno Rosskopf) and teenaged Hendrik (Leon Orlandianyi) — a Slovenian version of The Stink Eye when they show up in their Jeep XJ, with all their family possessions packed into a trailer Mom is towing. And it’s not just because they’re “Krauts” moving into the Slovenian border country (with Austria).

They’re moving into a house that “looked less crappy online,” Henrik notes, even as the icky realtor (Michael Pink) gives them the hard sell. There’s salt in front of every door, “for the snails,” the realtor assures them. And darned if there aren’t a lot of those. Bug-nut Eddie notices.

Their next door neighbor greets them with an unfriendly “Let’s see if you last longer than the others (in German with English subtitles, or dubbed).”

But as Mom has a research job in the nearby mountains’ caves, there’s nothing for it but to make the best of it.

Then little Eddie stats sleepwalking. He starts muttering in Slovenian as he does. He makes markings on Henrik’s walls. And when the flashlight hits the kid’s eyes, they’re black — a dead “We’ve moved into a haunted house” giveaway.

With Mom distracted and away most of the day, Henrik starts fishing around for answers, dodging or trying to dodge the local bullies as he does. Nerdy Fritz (Lars Bitterlich) might

Fritz is a shrimp, a bit prone to fainting but a handy guy to know. Who do you know who speaks Slovenian? Ida (Marii Weichsler), who is Hendrik’s age, does.

“He lives in the Polzmann house and his brother’s possessed by a ghost,” is Fritz’s cute, quick and matter-of-fact summation. There’s nothing for it but to figure out who is speaking Slovenian through the child and what connection they have to the haunted Polzmann house, where a tragic murder-suicide happened 40 years ago.

Seances and questions of the undead, nosing around town, all that comes into play as they try to piece together what this ghost (ghosts) want and what they’re trying to tell them.

Hendrik and Ida piece together the puzzle, and struggle with teen chemistry as they do, with Fritz providing the comic relief as these children do all their digging and sleuthing out of the reach of the adults who won’t believe them, or who have something to hide.

It’s lighthearted and as horror movies go, something of a “Goonies” lark. But low expectations and having pre-teens to watch this with (the target audience) won’t leave you too disappointed.

If you have to watch this in English, be aware of this. The dubbed version scrubs out the testy Slovenian prejudices, their Hitler-inspired antipathy for “Krauts,” who once invaded and occupied their country. These aren’t “Kraut” kids in the English language version, but “city kids” that the locals despise on principle.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, frights and threats of violence

Cast :Leon Orlandianyi, Marii Weichsler, Lars Bitterlich, Benno Rosskopf, Julia Koschitz and Michael Pink.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Prochaska, script by Marcel Kawentel and Timo Lombeck, based on a Martina Wildner novel. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

No one in Hollywood would dare make a movie about a 25-30 year old actor taking up with an infatuated girl of 16. Not today. That’s the sort of thing that makes career-ending headlines when it happens off screen.

But “Spring Blossom” was written and directed by its young star, Suzanne Lindon, so it is seen almost exclusively from her character’s point of view.

She’s 21 and can still pass for 16, and is the daughter of actors, so she not only has a leg up in the business, but is plainly sophisticated for her age. And she’s French, growing up in a society that outsiders see as more “adult” about such things when perhaps that’s just a sign of patriarchal sexism, which also explains why they’re a bit late to embracing #MeToo.

But that “point of view” is the most important consideration of this wistful “romance,” a movie by a very young woman about what might draw a teenage girl to an older man who catches her eye.

Her character, Suzanne, is just social enough to sit in with her friends and overhear their gossip about school, boys and what not. But she’s not listening. She gets invited to parties, but goes so rarely that it’s a surprise when she finally shows up for one. Where she’s bored with a beer in her hand.

“I’m tired of everything.”

But there’s a handsome actor (Arnaud Valois) rehearsing a role just down the street from where she lives. He is bearded, rides a Vespa and smokes Gauloises Blondes as he chews his morning jam and bread at the cafe next to the theater. We don’t have to hear an interior monologue about what gets her attention, it’s all of that — the romance of his profession, the lure of “adulthood,” and a means of acquiring that all-important French label ahead of your peers.

“Sophisticated.”

In a pubescent rush, Suzanne starts learning how to wear makeup and plotting ways to put herself in the path of the mysterious Raphael. His scooter has an oil leak? On NO! How will he get to the cafe, to work and at the same time every day she can park herself in front of him?

We’ve seen her sweettalk her mother (Florence Viala) into a later curfew. But now she’s asking Dad (Frédéric Pierrot) the most awkward question he’s probably ever gotten from her.

“Do men prefer girls in skirts or pants? (in French, with English subtitles).

Next thing you know, she’s in the shortest skirt she can find and has struck up conversations with the actor. He is charmed, maybe smitten, and perhaps he’s even aware of what’s going on here. We notice, as she does, that he’s not kissing her on the cheek, but on the neck. He starts planning his day around seeing her.

And when he shares the overture to his favorite opera with her via headphones at “their” cafe, they fall into a perfectly choreographed seated-dance to its rapturous rhythms and melody.

But here’s something else we know about Raphael. He’s a bit bored with his world, too. As exotic as it can seem to an outsider — Suzanne sneaks into their rehearsals — acting in repertory can be a drag.

And the show The Constant Players are rehearsing? Strindbergh’s “Miss Julie,” about a girl’s infatuation with an older, engaged servant in the household.

Whatever is going on here, it’s chaste enough that the creepiest things about “Spring Blossom” are the search engine terms on its IMBb page and some of the faintly-icky comments there from non-critics who have seen it.

As a filmmaker, Lindon uses flights of fancy to capture Suzanne’s frame of mind, dancing down the middle of the street at this “first love,” studying how to attract a man’s attention in the most innocent ways, but drawing the line…at getting on his Vespa.

“My parents would kill me.”

She is secretive, guarded. And Raphael is cagey about declaring his state of mind as well. No dancing for him, but Valois suggests a couple of options as Raphael kisses her hand and, more flirtatiously, her neck. The more politically correct path might be he’s just using her to get deeper into “Miss Julie,” to experience the sensitivities of his character and the dilemma he’s in.

There’s a delicacy we feel in every scene in the film. When you’re directing yourself, viewers can’t say “She’s objectifying the character,” because sometimes, a teen changing clothes or breakfasting in her underwear is just a teenager being herself around her family.

Lindon takes these various licenses she gives herself and her movie to conjure up something thoughtful, tender and coming-of-age insightful in “Spring Blossom.” It’s not titillating and not particularly deep, either. But it allows the rest of the world to look at this relationship and see it for what it is, what it might be and what it shouldn’t be, and maybe take a breath before jumping to any more conclusions about it.

MPA Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast:  Suzanne Lindon, Arnaud Valois, Frédéric Pierrot, Florence Viala

Credits: Scripted and directed by Suzanne Lindon. A Kimstim release.

Running time: 1:13

Some seriously “special” effects and a curious time and mind-bending story are the selling points of “Super Me,” a high-gloss Chinese wish fulfillment fantasy. It’s about a guy who learns to manipulate his nightmares into dreams that grant him his heart’s desire.

But what did fairytales and parables teach us about ill-gotten gains? They’re a double-edged sword.

We get to the “swords” part pretty quickly, but first we’ve got to meet the guy who finds himself slashed and stabbed by them nightly. Sang Yu (a mugging, bug-eyed Talu Wang) is a struggling, starving writer whose insomnia has reached the critical stage.

He’s sat in on lectures on the id and the ego and dreams, consulted therapists and specialists and a shaman. Their opinions and expertise become a sleep-deprived blur.

“What is a schizophrenic? (In dubbed English, or Mandarin with subtitles) It’s someone who’s seen what he’s not supposed to.”

He’s a screenwriter who can’t break through, can’t face his landlord or his bullying agent, San (Coa Bingkun). His nightmares have demons slashing and punching him through walls and windows, and it’s getting so bad he can’t distinguish reality from dreams.

Are others seeing him lifted off the ground and bloodied, without seeing what’s doing this to him?

He’s ready to end it all, but this foodcart operating philosopher reminds him that “Wishing for death reminds us that we’re alive.” All he’s got to do is assure himself “This is all a dream,” and he’ll awaken.

And with that knowledge, he starts to fight back. That’s how he hangs onto the sword that half-impales him in one night terror, how he steals an ancient battle axe in another. He starts pawning these dream “gifts,” then starts plotting dreams that put him in museums, bank vaults and the like. He wakes up richer, if a bit rattled, after each nightmare.

There’s this singer (Song Jia) he obsessed about in college, now depressed and trapped in a coffee shop she can’t sell. He begins to buy his way into her attentions, and into her affections. She’ll be more impressed if he’s not just rich enough to buy her shop and a Maserati, but a successful screenwriter, too.

But somebody’s going to have to pay the piper. And as his dreams start to come back around to giving the demons that haunt him the upper hand, “reality” catches up as well.

The look of Zhang Chong’s (“The Fourth Wall”) film is more impressive than the hard-to-follow “Inception-ish” story or the acting. Wang and Bingkun plays things broadly, Jia plays one note and their character’s actions don’t make a whole lot of sense in a plot that feels as if clues and explanations were left out.

Maybe there’s an East/West schism in the way this scans and processes that tripped me up, or I’m missing the Freudian/Jungian implications in what’s presented. But I never picked up on why this is happening, “Why him?” and what exactly these “demons” represent.

That makes for a very good looking wish-fulfillment fantasy that doesn’t translate, with or without subtitles.

MPA Rating: TV-14, violence, profanity

Cast: Talu Wang, Song Jia, Coa Bingkun, Wu Gan, Kiven Lee

Credits: Directed by Zhang Chong, script by Zhang Chong and Zhang Dongdong. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42