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She is curious, looking at this new city through new eyes. She is also evasive, changing the name she gives when asked, and the city and even the country where she is from.

It’s obvious to the much younger man who comes on to her in the checkout line that she’s not from around here. “Tourist?” Not that she’s immune to his charms.

Not carrying luggage, not providing ID to the hotel she wants to check into, Petra or Susanne or whoever (Johanna Wokalek) seems aimless, drifting through Vienna, hitching a ride to Bratislava because that’s where the driver is bound.

Like the song that underscores “Freedom,” that famous Richie Havens tune from Woodstock, she’s improvising, reveling in something without analyzing or having the luxury of thinking it through.

Back in Germany, rumpled, harassed lawyer Philip (Hans-Jochen Wagner) dancing as fast as he can. He’s riding herd over a just-turning-rebellious teen daughter and a high-maintenance boy of about eight. He’s struggling to get a handle on how to try his most difficult case, a racist teen who put an African immigrant into a coma.

And he’s appearing on TV, defending himself and pleading for answers. His wife has disappeared. The police wonder if he had something to do with it. And he’s not sure if “Nora” is dead or alive.

“Freedom” (“Freiheit” in German) is German filmmaker Jan Speckanbach’s second feature film and second movie (“Die Vermissten” was the first) about a disappearance. Here, he dives into a breakup, letting us pass judgment on who might be at fault, upending that judgment and then flipping it again.

We are totally immersed in Nora’s get-away, her eagerness to cover her tracks, go off the grid and “start over,” making new Czech friends. That first friend she has sex with as she is just starting to enjoy her “freedom” with right up to the moment when she catches him going through her wallet for ID. The second person she befriends is a sexy blonde (Inga Birkenfeld) who makes a living as an onstage sex performer at a few-holds-barred Bratislava club.

But Nora left behind two kids. Is the increasingly short-tempered bear Philip really all that bad? When he threatens and manhandles his punk client and then physically tosses his daughter’s new boyfriend out of their apartment, we wonder.

Wokalek (“The Baader Meinhof Complex”) makes Nora mysterious, resourceful and fragile. We never know what’s going to trigger her, where her paranoia will take her and who it will yank her away from. Later flashbacks explain some of her motivation, but there’s still a lot that’s unknowable about her.

Wagner (“Lore” was the film he’s in that got the widest release in the US) makes Philip equally unknowable. Was he cheating on Nora, or just too dull and stuck in a rut to be interesting? His temper and his quick turn towards another pair of empty arms make us wonder.

Speckenbach makes this broken couples’ shared mysteries painful and fascinating, deftly dropping in Germany’s “baggage” to older Czechs and reputation for racism in, pointedly leaving any lightness out. Their sexual dalliances have “Freedom” about them, and release. But joy? Not that we can tell.

As Richie Havens sings in the opening scene, only getting into the verse in the film’s coda, “sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.”

MPA Rating: unrated, explicit sex, nudity

Cast:  Johanna Wokalek, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Inga Birkenfeld, Andrea Szabová, Ondrej Koval

Credits: Directed by Jan Speckenbach , script by  Andreas Deinert, Jan Speckenbach. A Corinth Films release.

Running time: 1:40

Of all the ways the folks north of the border could have approached the story of a 1970s marijuana-use-and-its-consequences study, why’d they take the “Lifetime Original Movie” tack?

“The Marijuana Conspiracy” could have been an over-the-top “outrage” tale, with a hint of camp, like “Reefer Madness.” The funniest nation (per capita) on Earth could have gone “stoner romp.” Get Samantha Bee or Seth Rogen, Catherine O’Hara or Caroline Rhea on board.

But writer-director Craig Pryce (“The Dark”) went for something safe and squishy and sensitive instead. Maybe he got close to the real women this story is based on and felt too respectful. Whatever the case, what he turned out is too bland to make an impression.

The “true” story — in 1972, with marijuana use peaking and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (the new guy’s Dad) supposedly thinking of legalizing it, a “foundation” put government money into a study of its use and abuse.

The movie’s thesis, based on the fact that this study’s findings were never made public, is that the government covered-up the shocking news that pot isn’t The Demon Weed of Myth, the “gateway drug” to heroin, that it might not even “kill ambition,” as the montage of Canadian news coverage of the day seen here claims.

In the film, veteran character actor Derek McGrath is the cigar-chomping, whisky drinking diabetic in charge of the foundation underwriting the research, an old guy with “an agenda.”

Gregory Ambrose Calderone plays the vegetarian, long-haired hippy sociologist who argues for letting “the data speak for itself.” He gets the assignment because he’s young enough to “speak their lingo.”

And as they’re most concerned about pot’s effects on young women (ahem), this is what Project Venus would do. Two groups, a “control” group having no access to pot and a study group who’d have a nightly “eight o’clock toke” would be isolated for 98 days, put to work making Macrame, watched,questioned and weighed by staff.

Their behavior would be noted, their productivity measured, a psychotherapist (Paulino Nunes) would counsel them should pot paranoia kick in, and any “munchies” weight gain they experienced would be documented.

The young women, under 25, were hand-picked from applications and screening interviews. They’d be well-payed, and they’d have access to legal weed every night before bedtime.

Far out.

Those women are a cross-section of Toronto life — the college-bound Black woman (Tymika Tafari), the pale, underweight homeless girl (Julia Sarah Stone), the indulged, globe-trotting experimenter/”enthusiast” (Kyla Avril Young) and so on.

“This is gonna be the BEST job ever!”

The staff would include the nurse (Marie Ward) the ladies nickname “Nurse Ratched” and the hunky research assistant (Luke Bilyk) with inappropriate eyes for one of the subjects.

We see the women settle in, the data start piling up and the THC dosage raised to measure how much is too much when it comes to lethargy impacting productivity, and how much pot contributes to the shaky mental health of women kept from direct contact or even phone calls with their families. (This seems pointless, scientifically).

The players make light surface impressions through the film’s pranks and giggling fits and uncomfortable chats with the hidebound, pipe-smoking shrink who is about 50 years away from ever being “woke.”

This cross-section of Toronto in the ’70s has racism, sexism, homelessness and homophobia to wrestle with, even as those enduring that are getting their “mellow yellow” on every night at eight.

Thus, “Conspiracy” overreaches, tries to comment on too many other issues bubbling to the surface at the end of the ’60s. That’s why the film is entirely to long, and that’s why it doesn’t really play. Pryce loses the thread and wallows in the melodrama rather than in focusing on stoned flirtations, stoner hijinks and hard data that starts to suggest that maybe pot isn’t a bad way to take the edge off, and that it has other benefits as well.

The implications of all this are clear and damning, as holding up legalization (it’s now legal all over Canada) filled prisons, invented new organized crime players and generally accomplished nothing good.

That serious subtext and the social justice stuff jammed-in explains why the picture never finds a pleasant tone and the story, rather than zipping by, feels bogged down, “Day One” to “Day 98.”

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol use, pot use, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tymika Tafari, Julia Sarah Stone, Kyla Avril Young, Morgan Kohan, Luke Bilyk, Gregory Ambrose Calderone, Derek McGrath and Paulino Nunes.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Craig Pryce. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:02

Yeah, he’s just started his “comeback,” thanks to “Together Together.” And he’s taking stands, too.

Here you go.

July 23, Ted’s back on the…pitch.

We first glimpse Zenia’s “gift,” his “super-power,” when he interviews for a work permit with a Polish bureaucrat, the first person we hear make a joke about where the young man is from.

“Pripyat? Near Chernobyl? Perhaps you’re radioactive!”

Others will make this crack as the Russian Zenia, played with a quiet inscrutability by Alec Utgoff, works his way through a gated subdivision of McMansions and bored, sad or disillusioned Poles.

Because the masseuse has gotten his work permit. He rubber-stamped it himself, after he used his touch and hypnosis to put the pencil-pusher to sleep. That’s his “super-power,” something he trots out at the end of massages for a widow, a bulldog fanatic, an alcoholic housewife, a cancer patient and a brusque, bullying soldier.

Zenia is the face and voice of calm reassurance, a “guru” to one and all, many who are wondering if it’s “Never Gonna Snow Again.”

The latest from Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Englert, the Polish creators of “In the Name Of” and “Mug” and “Body,” is a cryptic dream, a drift into nostalgia with dark hints of a future without snow, or perhaps with the ashy fallout of Chernobyl repeated instead.

Chernobyl isn’t a text here, but a subtext as Zenia has dreams and flashbacks to the mother who died when he was young. He lives in a Polish version of those ugly, aged “Soviet” apartment high-rises and stumbles into packs of dogs like those left behind when the nuclear accident emptied the city and all the towns around it.

And he’s as inclined to speak his hypnotic words to his clients in Russian as he is Polish. To a one, they pass right out — most proclaiming they’ve “never felt more alive” when they wake back up.

The movie’s not utterly impenetrable. But with its silences, glacial pace and the intimate nature of its minor moments of drama, downing an espresso or two before watching it is the best guarantee that Zenia won’t put you to sleep, too.

The houses have nearly identical facades and similar floorplans, each with its own elaborate (and tacky) classical music doorbell — “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” “Ride of the Valkryies.” There are rarely curtains behind the former “Iron Curtain,” apparently. People know each other’s business, and fret over who might be Zenia’s favorite.

What are seeing here? What is the message? Is it a parable about misguided nostalgia for the “bad old days” of the Soviet Bloc, revived in the Putin “strong man” era? Are the former satellite states, with their rightward government tilt, being hypnotized by a Russian massaging away their cares?

“I am taking away your misery,” Zenia purrs as this or that vulnerable suburbanite melts in his hands.

That’s one view of “Never Gonna Snow Again (Sniegu juz nigdy nie bedzie),” not that there are many obvious other take-aways served up here.

As it’s an opaque story told in a style quite unlike anything Hollywood or anybody else is serving up, perhaps it’s worth the challenge seeing it presents. I found it lacking much of anything other than tone, obscurity and randomness.

MPA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, smoking

Cast: Alec Utgoff, Maja Ostaszewska, Agata Kulesza, Katarzyna Figura

Credits: Scripted and directed by Malgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:55

Cypress trees in their grey winter garb, moss and rust-covered RVs, McMansions and omnipresent double-wides show off Greater Tampa to accurate effect in “Painkiller,” a thriller about the opioid epidemic, those who profit from from and a murderous “avenger” out to stop them.

It’s a straight-up C-movie starring Michael Paré (“Streets of Fire,” “City of Lies”) and horror movie mainstay Bill Oberst Jr. as a pill-pushing doc and the internet radio host and ex-cop hellbent to “out” him and others behind the “white collar genocide” crippling the “pill-plagued USA.”

And then there’s the hooded, masked “six shooter” killer who ranges far and wide, from Lutz to Temple Terrace, Baskin to Carrolwood, lecturing and shooting street dealing grandmas, doctors and lobbyists and Big Pharma execs and the like.

“D’ya ever stop to think about the lives you’ve ruined?”

The intrigues aren’t intriguing, the complications aren’t complex and the performances perfunctory.

And then there are all the incendiary, legally-actionable “headlines” slapped on the fake newspapers and on the screen after many a murder. That’s the sort of detail that comes from screenwriters whose only experience of newspapers is seeing them on the screen in B-movies.

As the body count piles up and we’re told, point blank, that the police approve of his work, we accept that filmmaker Mark Savage has no interest or idea how to create mystery or suspense. Perhaps he has a future in video games, where “story” isn’t as important as the “score.”

Kudos to any actor who gives her or his all to enterprises like this, but “Painkiller” is nothing to be proud of or highlight in your credits.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic gun violence, sex, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Michael Paré, Bill Oberst Jr., Alexander Pennecke, Kristina Beringer

Credits: Directed by Mark Savage, script by Tom Parnel, David Richards and Mark Savage. A Delirium release.

Running time: 1:25

An arresting setting, funereal tone and solid performances don’t wholly atone for a script that’s thin on frights or suspense in the Aussie thriller “Sweet River.”

It’s about lost children and adults who die supernatural deaths when they try to move on from the trauma of those “lost.”

The setting is the cane country of Queensland, Australia — Tweed Valley. The forlorn town of Billins was where a serial killer once roamed. Children disappeared, and the rippling effects of their loss hang over the place to this day.

That’s where Hanna (English born Aussie actress Lisa Kay) has come to get out of her head, listen to her meditation tapes and maybe dry out. She’s rented a manager’s cottage on the edge of the cane fields, one cane field in particular.

What she doesn’t know as she listens to “the currents can sweep you away in life” and other taped platitudes about grief and despair, is that the bloke (Jeremy Waters) who rented it to her has gotten drunk at the local watering hole and come to an untimely end on his way home.

The police are saying he drowned, when we’ve seen the wreck, heard the noises and seen the man yanked away into the trackless cane fields. The police didn’t hear him threaten to “finally harvest that field” in the seedy Billins Hotel bar. The police aren’t interested in doing the math.

Drowning. “That’s what’s going on my report and that’s where we’re leaving it.”

The property owner (Martin Sacks) makes good on her rental, but he and his paranoid wife (Geneviève Lemon) are suspicious of Hanna’s motives for coming here. The ugly history of the place has to be a draw. And as she asks about why everyone around here keeps red lights on their porches, even covering their flashlights, and other questions about the disappearances and then later deaths that followed the supposed conclusion of “the case,” it comes out.

She lost a child. She can’t rest until she’s found his body and buried him. All these hallucinations she’s having, seeing children in the cane, and all those later mysterious deaths have something to do with that vast field outside her window.

It’s all terribly promising, a woman convincingly gutted by grief, looking for answers so fervently she starts seeing things, discovering the end result of such torment in Elenor (Lemon), the wife of the understanding but leery John (Sacks).

People see a child in the road in dark, fear they’ve hit it or swerve to avoid it, and bad things happen. They’ve been seeing this happen for years.

Director Justin McMillan doesn’t over-explain who all the players are in this puzzle, but we can pick up on the disparate threads — flashbacks showing the killer’s connection to the community, assorted children, some more logical a part of the plot than others.

A little confusion isn’t a bad thing, but there’s more than enough to weaken the impact of the attempted frights here. This unsuspenseful blend of “Lovely Bones” mystery and “Children of the Corn (Cane)” sucks you into its gloom, but fails to deliver shock, awe or closure.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lisa Kay, Eddie Baroo, Martin Sacks, Geneviève Lemon, Chris Haywood 

Credits: Directed by Justin McMillan, script by Eddie Baroo, Marc Furmie. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:41

“Together Together” is an offbeat comedy that sets out to redefine “intimacy” for a “woke” and lonely age.

A pre-pandemic romantic/”unromantic” comedy, it has the currency of a Woody Allen takedown and a clever way of warily circling any notion of a May-October romance. But what stands out in writer-director Nikole Beckwith’s first attempt at comedy (“Stockholm, Pennsylvania, a thriller, was her debut) is a pre-pandemic sense of isolation. It revels in the quiet despair of disconnection and the sheer relief at being forced to reckon with someone and get along with them well enough to finally get to know them.

In Matt, a 40something man who has decided that he wants a family even if relationships seem to evade him, Ed Helms has a role right in his sad but hopeful, eager but clumsy wheelhouse. Since he broke out in “The Office,” that’s been his brand — a hangdog who always tries too hard, a misguided, tone-deaf “enthusiast.”

And relative newcomer Patti Harrison — she was in “A Simple Favor” — sparkles as Anna, the aimless young barista who passes Matt’s awkward questionnaire, signs on the dotted line and takes the money.

“If ‘family’ is important to someone, you should be able to make one,” she reasons. And less tactfully, “I know it’s not the best thing in the world, being alone.“

But the first glimpse at the Anna beyond the contract in that early meeting is what sells Matt. Anna reveals her ultimate, intimate qualification. She had a baby in high school.

“I do know what it’s like to carry a baby, and then give it up.”

There’s no judgment in saying that single line is freighted with sadness. We don’t need to know she’s now estranged from her family, because she is. We don’t need to see her checkbook to pick up on her needing cash. And we don’t need to ponder her sense of self-worth, because she’s 26 and has already done the math of what she has that’s most valuable about her at this stage in her life — her uterus.

“Together Together” is about his buying her “gifts” that are actually for a baby she won’t keep, or to ensure that she drinks the right teas, eats the right diet and maybe has comfortable shoes as she starts carrying around extra weight in a job that keeps her on her feet.

He’s micromanaging, another Ed Helms “enthusiast” character. It takes Anna a while to start pushing back, to belatedly establish boundaries.

We learn bits and pieces of Anna’s story, but even the hardest question she can ask Matt seems beyond answering.

“Why are you alone?”

Beckwith decorates this tale with a deadpan “couples” therapist Matt insists they see (Tig Notaro, on the mark), a droll nurse/tech at the OB-GYN office (Sufe Bradshaw, whose eyerolls are all implied) and Anna’s over-sharing, chatterbox gay barista coworker (Julio Torres).

The only parents involved are Matt’s, with Nora Dunn as his rude, judgmental mother and Fred Melamed as the Dad who divorced her, and whose tactlessness at least comes from a kinder place, like Matt’s.

The ebb and flow of the Anna/Matt connection and the emotional distance it’ll take for her to go through with their planned clean break makes a fascinating, if chilly, do-si-do for these two to square dance.

And the “romance” structure of “Together Together” gives the film a sweet sense of longing, even if a guy having to force a woman to watch “Friends” with him underscores “She’s too young for you, sport.”

But that “Friends” choice gives away this slight but thoughtful comedy’s intentions as surely as their almost-funny first meeting 88 minutes earlier. It might not wholly succeed, but Beckwith’s “Together Together” is wrestling the word “relationship” away from wherever it is now and back to a simpler time, when “I’ll be there for you” meant something, and not just to Phoebe, Joey, Chandler & Co.

MPA Rating: R for some sexual references and language

Cast: Ed Helms, Patti Harrison, Tig Notaro, Nora Dunn, Julio Torres, Rosalind Chao and Fred Melamed.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nikole Beckwith. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time:

Simi Liu is the lead but Awkwafina, Michelle geog and Tony Leung are a lot more familiar to Western audiences.