Movie Nation

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

Here’s a fun little cover-up-a-killing thriller set in the cutthroat subculture of board games and their creation.

“Murder Bury Win” sports a few flashes of wit and some engaging characters, but lacks the pacing and punchiness that might have put it over the top. In a “games” sense, call it a draw and give everybody a do-over because this is too promising in a “better luck next time” sense.

Chris, Adam and Barrett are board game nerds who have this concept they’re personally beta-testing as they try to raise funds via gaming’s version of GoFundMe or Kickstarter. But it’s slow going.

And the game? Even they have to see it “needs work.” Game store manager Chris (Mikelen Walker) and sensitive Barrett (Henry Alexander Kelly) have to tone down antic-Adam (Erich Lane) and his more psychotic murder fantasies. And as we watch them do a role-playing walk-through, even we can see that bear traps and fingernail cutters aren’t the most “practical” murder weapons.

That’s when Adam is contacted by a mysterious stranger who asks mysterious questions, followed by making a mysterious proposal. Come to his place in the woods so they can “discuss” “Murder Bury Win.”

We figure out that the secretive recluse is their indie gaming idol, Victor von Stubbs (Craig Cackowski) long before they do. We figure out his “game” quickly, as well, as he shifts from expertly diagnosing the “impractical” problems of their game, to asking questions that take on the air of cover-my-tracks menace.

Yes, he wants their game. No, he has no intention of paying them what it’s worth. They barely have time to reject this when an “accident” happens. Adam is the first to figure out that thanks to their presence, their fingerprints and bloody hands and their “recent (Internet) search history,” if they call the cops, they will be the only suspects the police will need. And when the crazy guy talks, the others reluctantly find themselves included in his scheme.

“We’re experts in murder,” he crows. “We made a game about it!”

Adam’s got all these “rules” he figures they’ll go by. Problem one? “Rule 5, work out your alibi and confirm it YESTERDAY,” should have been “Rule 1.” Problem two? They “made a game,” but it’s terrible. That’s actually a bigger deal than it should be because it’s so bad no one should be deluded into thinking “We GOT this.” And problem three? Adam’s an impulsive nut, and they’re sucked into following his lead because he starts taking rash steps to “dispose of the body” and whatnot.

Here and there, “Murder Bury Win” gets up the manic head of steam it needs to succeed as a dark comedy. Think of the first act of “Knives Out!” That’s your template.

But this film’s default mode is lumbering and slow. There’s talk and debate and “unforeseen complications,” with grisly tasks to accomplish at the end of each debate, so much so that you wish these three low-heat actors would just get ON with it.

The best scene, the one with the most tension and liveliest banter, is the one with V.V. Stubbs. Perhaps a little more of that was in order.

I like the idea, and any movie set in a weird subculture is automatically engrossing. More of this “board game universe,” including other obsessives, would have helped. The characters are amusing as “types,” but rather blandly played.

And the finale is downright half-assed.

But there’s promise here, and I think another crack at the concept could be a winner. Let’s hope nobody lures them to a remote cabin and bribes them out of their pitch.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Mikelen Walker, Erich Lane, Henry Alexander Kelly, Craig Cackowski

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Lovan. A Head Turner Films release.

Running time: 1:30

The phrase “sullen teen” doesn’t know borders and has symptoms one can recognize anywhere on Earth.

The frown is there just to break up the monotony of the omnipresent scowl. “Please” and “thank you” are the hardest words in any language to master. Smoking? Sure. But only if it infuriates adults. And even those who can’t spell “narcissism” know it because they live it, not that they’d admit it or acknowledge it as a problem.

We meet Ola as she’s settling in for her third driving test. She’s doing OK, but her phone is ringing off the hook, and its “F–king Police” ring tone is distracting her and annoying her driving instructor. One evasive maneuver later, she’s flunked, cussed and gotten into her first road rage incident, and she’s just 17 and still without a license.

“How’d you make out?” a pal asks, in Polish with English subtitles.

“Like a whore in the rain.”

Screen newcomer Zofia Stafiej makes an impressive debut as Ola in “I Never Cry,” a dramedy about a teen’s journey from self-obsession to self-awareness. For Ola, that’s a literal “journey,” one that puts the 17 year-old on a plane to Ireland.

Ola’s father left Poland “half my life” ago, she gripes to her mother (Kinga Preis). She grew up without him, even as his checks were financing her, her mother and the older brother that they both take care of because he has multiple sclerosis. Ola cuts school, chain-smokes, has just a couple of friends and is starting to get the attention of horny teenage boys. The attention she wanted was from her dad. So she’s damned well going to hold him to his promise to buy her a car “AFTER you get your license.”

She doesn’t give up that goal when he dies, killed in an accident on the docks in Dublin, where he works. Because she’s learned English, she is the one Mom sends to retrieve the body and “sort” all the financial, legal and diplomatic paperwork.

“Who is the 17 year-old here?” becomes Ola’s new bitchy phrase of choice as Mom nags her, by phone, all through her quest. The nagging is necessary because Ola isn’t in mourning and is easily distracted — a night out drinking with Irish teens, cadging cigarettes, on the hunt for the old man’s money and only his money.

Ola confronts the job agency agent (Arkadiusz Jakubik, quite good) who placed her father in a job, also Dad’s former employer, a not-that-professional funeral home — Glimpses of them manhandling a corpse raise an eyebrow. — and her father’s other life in Ireland, where and how he lived, and with whom.

And with every “give me the cheapest” and “I’m not letting it go” to those who want to shrug her off, one goal is in mind. That. Damned. Car. He. Promised.

“All the money he saved for me will be wasted on his funeral,” she fumes to one and all.

But that first meeting with the placement agent tips us and maybe Ola off that she’s judged the old man without knowing him. She never bothered to learn his middle name. A visit to the morgue has a dark, sad comedy about it. She doesn’t recognize the mangled body.

“Was he even your father?” the attendant wonders, in that judgmental Irish accent. “You seem to know nothing about him.”

Actor turned writer-director Piotr Domalewski (the Polish comedy “Silent Night” was his) gives his film a funereal tone and look — wintry, downbeat, droll. And he and a very dialed-in Stafiej take care not to let Ola come off too hateful.

She’s a little snot, to be sure. But she’s enterprising, to say the least. And she’s so on-task we kind of root for her to realize her dream, just so long as she’s not driving anywhere near us. It’s not until she and we recognize the selfishness of that goal that she starts to grow up and, as her mother is always pleading, manages to “Be nice for once.”

That internal journey and not the culture-shock of arriving in Ireland makes “I Never Cry” pay off, an intimate, darkly-funny story about that moment when a smart teenager finally figures out its not all about her.

MPA Rating: unrated, smoking, drinking and profanity, all involving teens

Cast: Zofia Stafiej, Kinga Preis, Arkadiusz Jakubik and Cosmina Stratan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Piotr Domalewski. A Forum Film Poland release, screening through BAM’s Kino Polska, and other services.

Running time: 1:35

I seem to recall diving into the original “Dunkirk” film, a black and white epic made in 1958, and never getting very far into it.

As war movies go, it’s a drab, formulaic affair, even by the “Longest Day” standards of its era. And director Leslie Norman is best-known for a minor horror tale of the day, “X the Unknown,” and lots of TV. So once I became a film snob and dug through my first copy of Halliwell’s “Filmgoer’s Companion,” I’d dismiss the film and him, no matter how much I like the genre.

Powering through it, now restored to peak condition and on Film Movement and available on BluRay, the real rub stands out. It takes over an hour to get going.

This MGM-financed Ealing production is state-of-the-art black and white of the day, intercutting documentary footage of the evacuation, German Stuka dive bombers and even bits of the actual “Miracle at Dunkirk” in with its staged recreations and fictional heroes. There is obvious rear projection of soldiers riding in vehicles, more obvious inside-studio footage recreating chunks of the beach and most-obvious-of-all “tank” footage, soldiers wading into the “surf” or clambering aboard a “little ship” to take them home. We can see the painted cyclorama behind them right down to the seams between sections and where it joins the water, meant to mimic calm seas.

John Mills was a star, a bit old at 50 to be playing an Army corporal. But Richard Attenborough and Bernard Lee weren’t household names. And that’s it for the “names” in the cast.

Lee was four years away from the role that made him immortal, as James Bond’s boss “M” in the Sean Connery Bond pictures. “Dunkirk” gave him his biggest lead role, as a cynical, posh journalist, dismayed at his government’s ineptitude in the months leading to the disaster, pressed into patriotic duty when his motor yacht, “Vanity,” is commandeered by the Royal Navy.

All involved seem, first frame to last, to be soberly concerned with “getting it right,” this key piece of Britain’s World War II legend. That weighs on the film and all but suffocates it.

But it starts with great promise. A voice-over narrator and documentary footage of British leadership and world events set us up for the end of the “phony war,” after the invasion of Poland and Norway, before the German axe fell on France in May of 1940.

Lee’s reporter, Charles Foreman, is unable to get any satisfaction out of press “communique” briefings from the military, Mills’ Wiltshire regiment watches newsreels, complete with Hitler-mocking cartoons before shipping out to France, and music hall performers meant to be the Two Leslies perform the new ditty “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line.”

Garage-owner turned government manufacturer Holden (Attenborough) is more concerned with the new baby at home and turning out his allotment of Army buckles than in “doing his part.”

Britain isn’t taking all this seriously, in other words.

There’s more of this than is needed, and the Battle of France scenes, with Mills’ Cpl. “Tubby” left in charge as his squad is separated in the “confusion” of the first orders to pull back eats up much of the film’s first hour.

“I never wanted the bloody stripes in the first place,” he gripes.

There’s an intriguing “playing at war” unreality to the scenes of troops waking up in remote, scenic Belgian fox holes, realizing others have retreated, puzzled fellows in crisp new WWI-era uniforms, stumbling about, looking for their main unit, camping in an abandoned farmhouse.

And then they blow up a bridge, stumble into a long line of refugees, watch them strafed by bombers and it all hits home.

“They seem to hate us.”
“Refugees hate everyone, Tubby.”

“Dunkirk” starts to find its way after folks at home learn they’re to report any vessels over 30 feet in length to the government. Before they know it, manufacturer Holden and his “Heron” and reporter Foreman are lobbying to pilot their own boats into service, parading past Parliament and under the Tower Bridge on their way down the Thames, and then into the Channel and into the thick of it.

But that brief moment of inspiration and pageant quickly passes, and we’re into the last of our WWII movie cliches, even if they’re set against the sweeping backdrop of the beach and “mole” evacuation. Moments of panic, but a stately calm is the order of the day, grousing about the RAF, the lack of support “back home,” considering surrender.

To its credit, there isn’t a lot of “top down” history shown here, just Vice Admiral Ramsay arguing for the return of “the big destroyers” which the Navy needs to take out of action to defend the island nation from invasion and protect the convoys that will feed Britain. This “Dunkirk,” like Christopher Nolan’s far superior “remake,” is only interested in the enlisted man’s point of view, the way civilian boat owners experienced this retreat.

There are echoes of this film in other treatments of Dunkirk, including Nolan’s. There was a 2004 BBC TV movie that featured a very young Benedict Cumberbatch, the French drama “Weekend at Dunkirk” telling the story of French troops who have to decide whether to stay or evacuate, and dramas from “Atonement” and “The Snow Goose” to the Oscar winning “Darkest Hour” have touched on it, recreating it in some way.

But for all its attempts at “sweeping epic,” Norman’s film comes off as malnourished, sedentary and slack, a drama lacking any sense of the clock ticking down on men’s fates and little sense of the stakes back home. It’s a dry, almost lifeless account, with even the deaths seeming stodgy and silent-film-acting melodramatic.

Seeing it suggests what drove Britain’s greatest current director, Nolan, to tackle the subject and take his suspenseful, vigorous and more visceral approach to the material. Nobody else had done this “darkest hour” triumph justice, certainly not this mediocre 1958 epic.

MPA Rating: Approved, violence.

Cast: Bernard Lee, John Mills, Richard Attenborough, Robert Urquhart

Credits: Directed by Leslie Norman, script by David Divine and W.P. Lipscombe based on a novel and two non-fiction books on the subject. An Ealing/MGM production re-released through Film Movement.

Running time: 2:15

Suki Waterhouse stars in this May 21 release.

Creepy enough for you?

Under 10 million watched the Oscars, under 9 watched the Grammys, under 7 watched the Golden Globes.

It’s like people woke up and decided awards shows are a bore.

Or…nobody wants to see this Zoom version of the circle jerk of self-congratulation.

Or, going out on a limb here, it’s not like the winners represented movies with big audiences/ticket sales. “Movie Stars” were in short supply in the nominated films, and the biggest one of them was the guy who died.

So, after last year and this one utterly broke the habit of watching the Academy Awards, is this a death knell? Will they be streaming only in the very near future, COVID or not COVID?

Let others dismiss stories of addiction and the awful ordeal of attempted recovery as a genre where over-familiarity has bred contempt. As long as America’s endless opioid epidemic goes on and as long as there are actors willing to “dress down” to be convincing in these roles, I’m on board.

We barely recognize Mila Kunis in her first moments in “Four Good Days.” She’s a wreck, head-to-toe, playing a manic addict pounding on her mother’s door — again. Molly hides her teeth, or what’s left of them, as she begs to come in, stringing together hopes and lies because she forgot the difference between them years ago.

Only Kunis’ Jim Parsons “sitcom stammer” gives away the actress beneath the dark black roots, sallow, pimpled face and breathless patter. It’s that affectation that sitcom-trained actors can’t shake, a too-obvious mannerism designed to make recited lines sound natural.

Mother Deb isn’t falling for the fake stammer or anything else. “I’ve heard this speech for ten years,” she mutters, closing the door with a firm “Get WELL.” As Glenn Close is playing her, we know she means business.

But what “Four Good Days” does better than most films on this subject is get at the parental guilt that lingers past that last moment Deb allowed herself to have hope. It’s what lets Molly wear Deb down and gives everybody, viewers included, that sliver of “This time she might mean it, she might get clean.”

The worn-out story arc covers a lot of familiar emotional ground, with the usual touchstones of such a journey. What’s novel here is how far down the road these two are. When Molly mentions her get-out-of-jail card, “rehab,” Mom calls her bluff. Deb grabs her keys and takes her.

But the testy argument at Deb’s front door, which spanned an evening and the next morning (Molly curled up on the porch to wear Deb down.) re-convenes at check-in.

Molly’s been in and out of such facilities 14 times. She’s been using heroin and methadone, Vicodin and whatnot 10 years. They’ll take her for three days, giving her chance to dry out, and a moment for her to cuss her mother out as she leaves.

They can also promise her a shot of an opioid antagonist, something that will kill her ability to get high off her chosen poisons. But to do that, she’s got to spend a further four days drying out. Her glowering mother and Mom’s not-that-encouraging second husband (Stephen Root) will have to let her in, put her up and put up with her as they try to keep temptation out of reach.

Director and co-writer Rodrigo García (“Nine Lives,” “Mother and Child”) keeps the focus narrow and the camera tight on his two stars as he pulls us into their complicated relationship. Each is a little too eager to point a finger at the other, or third parties, for Molly’s condition. Doctors over-prescribing Oxy for a high school injury is a story many a family could identify with. Deb left a bad marriage, which didn’t help things. An open drama like that tends to smother the hidden one that nobody wants to see.

Close lets us see Deb’s wariness, the callouses of mistrust that has her keeping her “problem” child at arm’s length, leaving her non-addict daughter (Carla Gallo) attention-deprived and resentful.

Kunis loses herself in Molly’s selfish amorality, showing us an addict’s convenient memory lapses — “I didn’t really sell your wedding rings, did I?” — and her practiced skill at poker-faced whoppers, the time-proven lies that give her wriggle room to get back in trouble, all over again.

Movies like this invite the viewer to second guess Deb, to put up our guard against another lie, another betrayal. We’re just waiting on another chance for Molly to let “shame” and her other “triggers” break her mother’s heart.

“At this point, all I have left is hope” is a line any mother of an addict can appreciate.

“Four Days” doesn’t cover much new ground, and some moments play as simple theatrics, such as when Molly called in to give a “scared straight” lecture to a classmate’s high school students.

But the arguments feel real and lived-in, two for pushing each other’s buttons and cutting to the quick.

Close lets us see Deb’s temper and panic and guilt and desperation, and rarely lets us remember the actress underneath. Kunis isn’t in her league, but more than holds her own in a role that rides on the wreck she transforms herself into.

“Four Good Days” never threatens to become a definitive film in an oft-filmed genre. But good acting, some seriously touching moments and lofty intentions lock us in on these “Four Good Days,” and have us, like everybody on the screen, just hoping for the best.

MPA Rating:  R for drug content, language throughout and brief sexuality

Cast: Glenn Close, Mila Kunis, Stephen Root and Joshua Leonard.

Credits: Directed by Rodrigo García, scripted by Rodrigo García, Eli Saslow. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:40