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Heroes with skills, stealth and unimpeachable integrity, able to access vast Intel resources without a whole lot of effort, “ops” that go like clockwork until that moment they don’t and murky values and motives from those “On High” — welcome back to Tom Clancyland.

“Jack Ryan” morphing into a TV franchise gave Hollywood the idea that dead Cold Warrior-thriller novelist still has what it takes to entertain. That’s how Clancy’s long-gestating novel “Without Remorse” made it to the big screen.

Michael B. Jordan plays our hero, John Kelly, a special ops commando whose “extraction” mission in Syria turns out to be not what his CIA intermediary (Jamie Bell). Those aren’t Syrian “contractors” they’re shooting it out with. They’re vodka drinkers.

“I don’t see any Russians,” Mr. CIA declares.

“Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse” is about the blowback from that Aleppo slaughterhouse. Other members of Kelly’s team meet with “accidents” when they get home. Kelly’s own house is invaded and his pregnant wife (Lauren London) is murdered.

His raging grief threatens to drown him, but his capacity for revenge is great, thanks to relentless training, vast experience and the endless latitude and luck built into this script.

With Mr. Secretary-of-Something (Guy Pearce) in his corner and his former CO (Jodie Turner-Smith of “Queen & Slim”) watching his six, there’s going to be ad platit’, as they say in Mother Russia — “Hell to pay.”

Director Stefano Sollima, who did a decent job with the “Sicario” sequel, keeps his shootouts good and brutal, his fist-choke-and-knife fights to the death.

Kelly’s first murderous reach for answers involves a gas can and a diplomatic SUV, and the stakes just get higher — absurdly-so — after that.

Jordan, who can still get into “Creed” fighting trim when the need arises, is an arresting presence and a believable “man of action.” Turner-Smith, Pearce and Bell were solid casting choices, too.

But this story exposes lapses in Clancy’s logic, giving the viewer jolts of “Wait, how’d they/he get there/escape that?” And the screenwriters saddle the late author’s story with racial subtexts that play as jarring dead-ends. A righteous speech about serving “a country that didn’t love us back” doesn’t advance the plot or explain Kelly’s enlistment, or even his “We’re playing by MY rules, now” actions.

Clancy wasn’t the most racially enlightened writer, so this casting could be taken as a timely updating and another way to open up a story whose mysteries become too obvious before the second act has settled in.

Still, the longer it goes on, the more over-the-top the set pieces get and the more dated the “geopolitics” of it all seems. Clancy has one big theme that turns up in almost all of his adapted-into-scripts novels, and it’s front and center here, served up without apology by a deliriously successful writer whose every book had a whiff of “His Greatest Hits” about it.

MPA Rating: R for violence

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, Lauren London and Guy Pearce

Credit: Directed by Stefano Sollima, script by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, based on the Tom Clancy novel. An Amazon Studios/Paramount release.

Running time: 1:49

The director later known as “The Master of Suspense” never lost his sense of humor. But it rather curdled into something dry and droll by the time he filmed “The Trouble With Harry” and his last “action comedy,” “North by Northwest.”

Just before he wound up the British portion of his filmmaking career and was lured to Hollywood by Selznick and good ol’greenback dollars, Alfred Hitchcock pulled out all the stops for the closest he ever got to a knockabout door-slamming farce.

“The Lady Vanishes” is packed with one-liners, stuffed with insufferable Brits Abroad (and those damned “foreigners” they so loathe) and almost frantic in its dive into amusing, implausible situations.

Soundstage-bound, with models and beautifully-rendered painted Alpine backdrops, it gives you the sense that this is about as far as a master-in-the-making could go in the malnourished British cinema, and that he knew it. And that knowing it, dammit-to-heck, he was going to have some fun with it before flying the coop for La La Land.

The first act is genuine farce, a bunch of avalanche-stranded travelers are packed into a snowed-in pan-European hotel in Mandrika, some sort of Austro-Italo-Swiss winter wonderland that to British snobs is just another “third rate country…Fortunately, I’m used to squalor.”

There’s the English “playgirl” (Margaret Lockwood) bound for home to be married because “I’ve been everywhere, seen everything” and done all there is to do — save marriage.

The fussbudget traveling companions (Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford) fret over the lack of “news” from home, “England on the brink” and all. What they mean is, of course, the “cricket test” in Manchester. Let’s just say their relationship isn’t explained, and they use the word “queer” in its traditional sense often enough for modern audiences to chuckle and notice.

There’s a tetchy, married (not-to-each-other) couple on some sort of Grand Tour fling, and this “complete cad,” a snide musicologist (Michael Redgrave as a “blue-blooded chick chaser,” never funnier) who gets under the skin of playgirl Iris.

Then the snow is cleared, they all pile onto a train, including a new friend Iris has made, an elderly English expat (May Whitty) who becomes Iris’s on-train confidante. Until, that is, “The Lady Vanishes.”

Iris asks about her and no one seems to remember Miss Froy ever being aboard. As we’ve seen Iris has had a window-ledge houseplant dropped on her, maybe she’s imagining it.

“If you must know, something fell on my head!”

“When, in infancy?”

And that’s rather the way of things from here on out, Iris and a first-reluctant bounder Gilbert (Redgrave) questioning, finding clues and wondering just what the heck happened to Miss Froy, with other passengers either oblivious or sinister in their reasons for not saying she was ever there.

Paul Lukas, later famous for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” plays the exotically-accented brain specialist who offers opinions and endures jokes, uniformed Mandrikans intervene, pistols are drawn, discharged and never really reloaded.

It’s all a lark and all good, clean (ish) fun, sort of a British take on the “screwball” farces common in Hollywood in the ’30s, with Hitchcockian mystery and villainy.

The director’s cameo comes very late, FYI, the moment our cast arrives back in Blighty.

But if you only know “The Master” for “Vertigo” and “a boy’s best friend is his mother,” this “Lady” is a corker, still hilarious after all these years.

MPA Rating: unrated, “approved”

Cast: Margaret Lockwood, Michael Redgrave, Paul Lukas, May Whitty, Linden Travers, Naunton Wayne, Emile Boreo, Mary Clare and Basil Radford.

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, script by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, based on a short story by Ethel Lina White. An MGM release.

Running time: 1:35

Truth be told, Christopher Walken has always worn his pants grandpa-high, his hats a little out-of-date. And he’s always grown a mean goatee, even in his silvery “legend of the cinema” years.

So it’s no stretch thinking of him as a grandfatherly Saskatchewan canola farmer getting his back up when pushed around by Big Ag in “Percy vs. Goliath,” a plucky, earnest and winning Canadian drama about One Man vs. Monsanto.

It’s funny how movies often go timid when depicting the wrongdoings of running-amok capitalism, changing the names of chemical, mining, fracking, banking or other gigantic entities.

But not Monsanto. Inundated with TV appeals from lawyers carrying on class action suits against the deadly weed killer Roundup, body blows landed by everyone from John Oliver to “60 Minutes,” they’re widely seen as a too-big/too-heavy-handed/too callous villain, and not just in the United States.

“Percy vs. Goliath” is based on the true story of a 73 year-old farmer sued by the company when its genetically modified canola seeds, designed to resist dying when fields are sprayed with Monsanto’s planet-poisoning Roundup, turned up in his crops.

Percy Schmeiser faced unsympathetic judges, shunning by his fellow farmers and a less-than-understanding media — at least at first and at least according to this script — when he was taken to court over patent infringement.

Environmental groups the world over were sounding the alarm over a behemoth of a company acquiring a patented, genetically-modified monopoly over the food people in every corner of the planet need to survive.

Percy was the grandson of “seed savers,” meticulous farmers going back generations, men who noted which fields produced the healthiest plants, keeping records and saving the best producing seeds going back decades to naturally select what worked best for them on the Schmeiser Grangeland farm.

And just by his casting, you know a threatening letter from Big Ag is going to get Walken, playing Percy, riled. His wife (Roberta Maxwell) backs him, as does his fellow farmer who sometimes pitches in as a hired hand (Adam Beach). There’s nothing for it but to pay a local lawyer (Zach Braff) leery of taking on a multinational corporation with bottomless pockets, endless resources, intimidating “investigators” and much higher-priced lawyers (Martin Donovan plays lead counsel for the bad guys). Using “seeds without a license?” Settle.

So that’s your advice, “offer them a fortune for sending me a nasty letter?”

Nope. Court it is, no matter how long the odds. Christina Ricci plays an environmental group recruiter who wants to back Percy, get the press on their side, if she can make Percy see his “precedent setting” case as one with implications for farmers all over the planet.

Clark Johnson’s film, based on a script by Garfield Lindsay Miller and Hilary Pryor, paints Percy as a maverick, a hustling small businessman who bails out of church if it looks like rain will damage crops he cannily got in the ground before his neighbors.

As Percy profits from his industry, maybe his neighbors resent the guy with the new combine, purchased by the premium price he gets for his first-to-market harvest. Maybe that’s why they turn on him.

“You know I’m not a thief, right?”

The arc of this story is how an inherently conservative man, who thinks “I just need to talk to Monsanto” to solve this “personal problem” or “mix-up,” is bullied, harassed and radicalized into a spokesman for a sacred profession, feeding the world. We see Percy turn into a compelling public speaker, and he sees how far-reaching his quixotic legal battle is when he speaks to a conference in India and visits a farm village there.

“Percy vs. Goliath” is dramatically flat, predictable in its pluck at times. But Walken is magnificent, and the other casting — on the nose as it is (Ricci can still pull off the young activist willing to sleep in her car for the cause) — works.

As this film and the earlier documentary on Percy’s struggle make clear, the villain here is faceless. With Monsanto we never need to see bad guys twirling their mustaches over today’s planned intimidation and shortsighted high-handedness. Thanks to guys like Percy Schmeiser, even farmers are starting to get it.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements 

Cast: Christopher Walken, Roberta Maxwell, Christina Ricci, Zach Braff and Martin Donovan.

Credits: Directed by Clark Johnson, script by Garfield Lindsay Miller, Hilary Pryor. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:39

A little behind the scenes footage from the Aug. 27 release. The horror. The horror.

This late May release has Martin Scorsese’s backing.

“The Sleepless” is drama and romance at its most elemental and charming — just two insomniacs, meeting and chatting on a long walk through the empty streets of Brooklyn at dawn.

Sometimes cute, occasionally touching and generally charming, it won’t go down as one of the great “just a conversation” films. The dialogue doesn’t paint glorious word pictures like “My Dinner With Andre” and isn’t tinged with the wistful hope of love of “Before Sunrise.” But the engaging leads make this meet-and-greet-and-debate romance worth losing yourself in.

Separately, they stare at their separate clocks, “3:00 a.m.,” “3:15 a.m.,” “3:45.” He (Nyambi Nyambi of TV’s “The Good Fight”) exercises, she (Rebecca De Ornelas) makes tea. Each resorts to ancient “Dick Van Dyke Show” reruns before they give up and make that 4 a.m. bodega run. That’s where they meet.

Why? Because all-night clerk/owner Vitek (Ajay Naidu of “Bad Santa” and TV’s “Blindspot”) is…helpful.

Zach is “not looking,” but Vitek urges him to open his eyes.

“How else do you find anything of value in this life?”

Sophia is leery, but Vitek’s “nice boy, a bit nervous, perhaps” disarms her.

It’s four o’clock on a Saturday morning. They’re not drunk or hungover or headed to work. Insomnia, fate, and Zach deciding to make an approach throws them together for an hours-long walk into the Brooklyn dawn.

“I’d rather be sleeping,” she confesses. “Always” he agrees.

His insomnia is a recent condition, and with no prodding he confesses “I never really knew sleep without alcohol.”

Hers is chronic and “I got tired of fighting it.” But true confessions time — “You want to know what keeps me up at night? Men. Fear of men.”

Not Zach, who is non-threatening and sensitive. Just men in general.

Over the course of their walk and talk, they will dissect their insomnia, break down what works and doesn’t work in their lives and share sitcommy profundities.

“Instagram quotes don’t work in real life.”

He jokes — “I know everything about you, Sophia.” She’s quick with a comeback — “Too soon.“

The debut feature of Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas isn’t particularly deep, but it gives us characters with shadings and flaws. The black and white cinematography paints Brooklyn in soft, romantic shadows. There are quirky encounters with an accordionist and barrista, and those are as predictable as the bits of bickering that enter our 30something couple’s dialogue.

Simple, inexpensive films like this without a lot of “plot” going on, are often passed off as “film festival movies,” without “names” in the cast or a genre that’s easy to sell (horror, action) to warrant a distributor picking them up.

But “The Sleepless” makes for a sweet, pleasant and thoughtful conversation overheard, and a reminder that people do “meet” each other and make connections, even in the forbidding city, especially in Brooklyn.

MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Nyambi Nyambi, Rebecca De Ornelas, Ajay Naidu, Leslie Silva and Masha King

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas. A TSF release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:17

With older actors, the offers are scarce even for the great ones. So there’s always a risk that some unfortunate bit of timing will put a stinker out the week you began by winning yet another Academy Award.

Well, that’s basically an Anthony Hopkins problem, with the esteemed Ben Kingsley and lest-we-forget-his-Oscars Mel Gibson also running that “risk.”

“Father” Best Actor Hopkins is the biggest name among the “names” in the cast of “The Virtuoso,” a limp hitman thriller built around Anson Mount, but a project that also lured Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan and David Morse into its clutches.

It’s the sort of film that starts out bad and occasionally lapses into awful, largely thanks to a dull lead and the fact that the script has him narrating, in voice over, his every move in the second person.

“You’re a shadow…you need to make it look like an accident.”

In the hands of Mount (of “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Hell on Wheels”), this sounds like textbook-on-tape readings from “Hitman 101.” It’s a dreadful touch and he recites those lines like an actor who realizes that.

Mount is an assassin for hire, living in the cliched “off the grid” cabin — friendless, barely up to the task of warming to a stray dog who comes by.

Hopkins is the mysterious figure who hands out our killer’s assignments. When one hit creates horrific collateral damage, we see why the two-time Oscar winner, six-time nominee took the role. He takes off the sunglasses and tells his hireling a tale of his Vietnam War years. That’s a good scene.

Nothing for it but to get on to the next job, eh? Our killer is sent into the mountains, looking for a person or place named “White Rivers.” Nobody in this corner of Pennsylvania has a clue.

The too-friendly waitress (Cornish) named “Dixy,” assorted redneck couples, a loner (Marsan) and a sheriff’s deputy (Morse) are all in the diner with our shooter, all potential targets. He narrates the hell out of this experience.

“The first piece to any plan is your escape. You want it clean, unobserved and anonymous.”

Who will live, who will die and who will lead our increasingly puzzled killer to this “White Rivers?”

Director Nick Stagliano (“Good Day for It”) creates a little suspense in that diner scene, and almost none any where else in “The Virtuoso.” It’s a clumsily obvious script and the lead isn’t talented or committed enough to hide the fact that he realizes that.

So what we’re left with is “What brought you here?” questions to ponder of the cast. The formidable Marsan probably figured, “I get to work with HOPKINS!” Morse, too. Cornish? She plays a blowsy “type,” but vamps it up and had to realize she has the best lines.

What does Dixy want? To “spend the night in a warm embrace, the kind you get only after great sex.”

Subtle. But she reminds Hollywood that she’s out there, middle-aged and sexy and looking for good work, or at least better than this.

But there’s no point in pummeling this picture or its star any more. The best anybody involved can hope for is that it’s quickly forgotten.

MPA Rating: R for violence, sexuality/nudity and language

Cast: Anson Mount, Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, David Morse and Anthony Hopkins

Credits: Directed by Nick Stagliano, script by  James C. Wolf. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:50

Thanks to the Florida Film Festival for posting these fun photos (David Martinez photographer) from our Q&A with the regal Isabella Rossellini from last week. She was a delight to talk to, the audience had some fun questions and we’re all looking forward to her playing Julia Child’s mentor and over-shadowed friend Simone Beck for a streaming series, her next big project.

You like for such evenings to end on a laugh, so as we were talking to a star from “Blue Velvet” about her most famous role, a “cult film,” I asked her this — “What was the weirdest random encounter you ever had with a fan of that film?”

Cult films make for cultish fans. See a Dario Argento nut, an Eli Roth cultist? Cross the street. “Blue Velvet” fans could be the same way.

“Well, there was ONE,” Rossellini said, after some thought. “It was a couple of years after the film came out, and I was walking in New York when this VERY TALL man came up to me, almost in my face, WILD EYED, and starts yelling, “Don’t you LOOK at me! “DON’T you look at me!”

“I was alarmed, quite frightened. I didn’t remember it was a line from Frank (Dennis Hopper) in the film. And he was SCREAMING it at me.”

She pauses.

“Of course, I didn’t know who Penn Jillette was.” (Another pause, for effect). “But apparently, he was a very big fan!”

The audience ROARS. I almost fell off the stage. Well-played, Ms. Rossellini.

I dare say Peter Jackson’s given up on his plans to remake a favorite war film from his childhood, 1955’s “The Dam Busters.” He started talking it up upon release of the last of his Hobbit films, and figured since he’d brought Middle Earth to life, surely he could recreate one of the most celebrated technical and aviation feats of World War II with state of the art effects.

Or so he told me and other journalists at the time.

But the last update on that “road blocked” project hints that he might never get to do it. He’s made his WWI documentary and is cutting together a Beatles one. Perhaps he’s had to move on. World War II movies are kind of passe, unless you’re Christopher Nolan.

As Joel Coen told me of his failed efforts to turn James Dickey’s terrific WWII novel “To the White Sea” into a movie, “If they won’t let you make it when you’ve got Brad Pitt as star, it won’t get made.”

The original “Dam Busters,” directed by Michael Anderson (“Around the World in 80 Days”) was nobody’s idea of a “star vehicle.” The acting is fine, the human dramatics almost an afterthought. The heroics would be understated, the emphasis on “team.” So Anderson treated the story like a heist picture, a WWII thriller about the technical challenges provided by an exceptionally difficult “heist,” as it were.

Very British, very “Italian Job” without the laughs.

A British engineer and aircraft designer, Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave), took the pre-war research that told the Royal Air Force that the key to crippling German industry was to strike the Ruhr Valley, added his own math that figured “it takes 100 tons of water to make a ton of steel,” and set his mind to puncturing the hydroelectric dams there.

No water, no electricity, flood a few mines and swamp some factories and “Jerry” won’t be able to build the planes and tanks it takes to defend itself. As the dams had anti-aircraft defenses and torpedo netting to stymy any attempts to get at them, and were massively thick, built out of concrete or wide earth dikes, that was always going to be a “sticky wicket.”

Wallis decided he’d need massive bombs, the biggest yet built. What’s more, they’d need to skip across the water to clear the anti-torpedo cables, roll down the face of the dam and explode.

One of the cool things that the longer cut of “The Dam Busters” just released by Film Movement emphasizes is how little “explaining” Wallis does in the film’s first act. Not everyone would “get” the science and math of figuring out a bomb, with added water pressure behind it, could breach an over-engineered (very thick concrete) German dam. Why belabor it?

So “Dam Busters,” filmed at a time when the story was fresh on the British public’s mind (ten years after WWII), became just a story of “bouncing bombs” and how to make them bounce.

That short gap in time meant that this film, like all the others in Britain’s peak decade and a half of WWII nostalgia, had access to the one special effect they didn’t dare fake — Avro Lancaster bombers, still flyable, with the best pilots who flew them available to bring them down for the low altitude runs that made the bouncing bombs skip, an effect which absolutely “makes” the movie.

A big reason Peter Jackson wanted to remake the film is that it can be realized with more of a human and heroic bent. Another might have been an ongoing affection for the famed “Dam Busters March” music by Leighton Lucas. But the most compelling had to be the effects. They were, even by the standards of the 1950s, primitive to the point of rubbish.

Hand painting unconvincing tracer bullets, frame by frame, onto the combat scenes and the saddest excuse for post-production “explosions” mar “The Dam Busters” and so date it that it’s almost hard to watch the tense, climactic third act.

Remaking it would mean fixing that, although any filmmaker would have to fake the film’s most important effect, which Jackson must have realized was the fleet of 1940s vintage Avro Lancasters, still in flying and fighting trim.

Real aircraft in movies like this matter. Christopher Nolan would never have faked a Spitfire to put Tom Hardy in over “Dunkirk.”

The easiest “fix” in a remake would be leaving out Group Commander Gibson’s (Richard Todd) dog, a black lab historically and unfortunately named the N word. The unfortunate fellow is in scene after scene, reminding us there’ll always be an England, and that the English invented most of the world’s racial slurs.

Redgrave, of Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” as well as “The Captive Heart” and an early version of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” gives our workaholic scientist all the pluck and whimsy the character can handle. Sure, he was making a weapon of war that would kills thousands and lead to the deaths of dozens of airmen attempting “the impossible.” But Wallis here is the inventor of “work the problem.” That parks the exploit in the realm of other moments of British WWII military ingenuity — the sinking of the battleship Tirpitz, the commando raids on Norway’s heavy water facilities and other targets.

Redgrave also gets to perform the most patrician comeback in all of WWII cinema. The Vickers Aircraft employee is hard-pressed to carry out flight tests of smaller prototype bombs, there being “a war on” and all that. A bureaucrat wants to know how in the heck he’s supposed to convince the higher-ups to peel off a frontline Wellington bomber for Wallis’s use on such tests.

“Well, if you told them I designed it, do you think that might help?”

Anderson went on to direct films well into my reviewing career (“Millennium” came out in the late ’80s), with many an actioner or thriller following his “Around the World in 80 Days” peak. The big budget sci-fi cult film “Logan’s Run” was the best known of his later credits.

Look for an “I’m new to film acting” turn by Robert Shaw, a flight crew member with a couple of scenes and a couple of lines, paving the way to “A Man for All Seasons” and “Jaws.”

But the best reason to catch up with this classic is to try and see what Peter Jackson sees in it, a peculiarly British sort of war film built on problem solving, a movie that includes lots of actual in-flight test run footage, and wonder if there’s enough computing power available to fake everything from bombs to bombers if this ever does get remade.

MPA Rating: Approved (racial slur advisory on re-release)

Cast: Michael Redgrave, Richard Todd, Ursula Jeans, Basil Sydney and Robert Shaw.

Credits: Directed by Michael Anderson, script by R.C. Sheriff. A British Pathe/Warner Bros. release on Film Movement.

Running time: 2:05

You’d have to go back — WAY back — to find a New York tale as sweet and uplifting as “The Outside Story.”

It’s the cinema’s first bon bon of 2021, a slight but unexpected delight.

Writer-director Casimir Nozkowski’s debut feature takes the simplest of conceits and a very engaging star turn by Brian Tyree Henry and spins it into an ode to a uniquely Big Apple take on neighborliness and human connection.

Henry, the best part of “Godzilla vs. Kong” and a winning presence in “If Beale Street Could Talk” (and TV’s “Atlanta”), plays a video editor for Turner Classic Movies, the go-to guy when a film star dies and the channel needs a moving and career-spanning “In Memoriam” tribute. We meet him on what has to be his worst day ever.

Charles just broke up with the righteous and gorgeous lawyer Isha (Sonequa Martin-Green). He’s stressed by prepping an elderly movie star’s premature obituary. And he’s “stuck” — as in a former documentary filmmaker mired in a “job” that’s not really his “calling.”

He’s stuck in a lot of other ways, it turns out — in habits, routines and the myopic, cocooned life he’s made in his Manhattan brownstone apartment, which no one can convince him to leave.

The word isn’t used, which is a wise choice because it would utterly take over the film. But Charles is something of an agoraphobic. He doesn’t go “out” the way he used to, and in a city where anything can be delivered, he doesn’t need to.

But circumstances and one delivered meal too many conspire to lock him out of that apartment. Charles spends an entire day learning that “no man is an island,” even one who’s attempted to be just that.

His dilemma? He’s stuck on his stoop, no shoes, no way into his second floor flat. He’s seen Andre (Michael Cyril Creighton) in the hall. Today he has to learn Andre’s name, because Andre can buzz him into the building. He has to make nice because Andre’s window opens onto the fire escape that leads down to Charles’ window. If he wants to try and get in that way, with his delivered meal cooling off and his boss sending frantic texts for this “In Memoriam” that TCM will need any minute now, Andre’s got to be the good neighbor Charles has was.

That is the first meeting in a day full of “firsts” for reclusive, maybe a little “on the spectrum” Charles. And this being a “New York story,” you KNOW there’s going to be an edge.

Andre has house guests from Norway. Turns out he’s a swinger. Charles has to transit the fire escape without looking like a pervert as he passes the window of the tween piano prodigy (Asia Kate Dillon) just upstairs from him. He’s got to talk the ticket-crazed traffic cop (Sunita Mani) out of thinking he’s a burglar, and then out of writing a ticket for his ex-girlfriend’s Jeep.

There are UPS deliveries and more angry texts from the boss, a dying cell phone, the occasional “scene” in the ugliest definition of that word, and the odd friendly word from the older lady who sits on the stoop next door (Lynda Gravatt). Sara is her name. No, Charles didn’t know her either. Not before today.

The laughs are New York touchy — accidentally confronting the person Isha cheated with and causing a huge fight with that lover’s lover, water balloon bombing kids, the shrill failed actress/mom living through that piano-playing tween.

The relatable moments include the battery death of a cell phone. No sense offering him a land line. “I don’t ‘know’ my boss’s number. I don’t know anybody’s number!” The New York touches include the tuned-in delivery guy who knowingly explains away a price hike in Charles’ favorite sandwich.

“Avocadoes. Blame the cartels!”

And the warm fuzzies are subtle yet almost overwhelming. The New York “romance,” if you want to label this that, that I think “The Outside Story” compares to is that charming “It Could Happen to You,” which paired Bridget Fonda and Nicolas Cage up decades ago, or the Thanksgiving “New York” classic “Pieces of April.” It’s not a city that lends itself to “sweet.”

Charles stuck “Outside” reminds us not just that we’re not alone, no matter how much we want to be, and that in the Big City, the biggest journey can be one of just a few steps on foot crossing a chasm you’ve built in your own head.

MPA Rating: unrated, very PG

Cast: Brian Tyree Henry, Sonequa Martin-Green, Sunita Mani, Michael Cyril Creighton, Asia Kate Dillon and Lynda Gravatt

Credits: Scripted and directed by Casimir Nozkowski. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:25