Movie Nation

When she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the callous, uncaring and otherwise inconsequential men and women who carried out The Holocaust and society’s ways of “normalizing” their actions, Hannah Arendt was seriously underestimating Hollywood’s response to one of the most monstrous crimes in human history.

When the movies came to tell this story, the villains would be played by Gregory Peck and Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet. They would love poetry and opera, urbane figures of sinister, rationalized villainy. Rarely would they be depicted as lumps, cowardly functionaries, dull mortals hiding behind “just following orders.”

Such a man was Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss, a World War I veteran lured back into “service” via SS leader Heinrich Himmler, an animal lover who might have been content to live out his equine fantasy on a farm had Himmler not put him in charge of the Auschwitz “extermination” camp in Occupied Poland for much of World War II.

Höss is the subject of “The Interrogation,” an Israeli film that uses the camp commander’s hastily-composed memoir, written awaiting execution for his role in the genocide, as its source material. It imagines a Polish translator/interrogator Albert (Maciej Marczewski) coming face to face with this unspeakably evil man (Romanus Fuhrmann), someone the Poles and the Allied Occupation governments want to speak out before he is hung for his Crimes Against Humanity.

Erez Pery’s film focuses on Höss’s reluctance to speak, the decision to talk based solely on an act of kindness he’d have never been capable of himself — Albert giving the SS officer back his wedding band — and his endless equivocations about his actions, most of them depressingly rational and thus all the more disturbing.

Höss recalls (in German with English subtitles) his indoctrination, the idea that “every order would have to be a sacred duty” drilled into him by the political/SS leaders over him. He recalls his greatest fear was being perceived as “soft,” as he was “too attached to the black frock” (the uniform) to disobey orders, even as he insisted he was “unfit for” this heinous duty. “I had too much compassion.”

Albert, leaving behind his wife and family for this work near the camp, which is where Höss would eventually be hung, tape records their interviews impassively. But his actions afterwards — a fling with a local prostitute, a violent response to a prisoner attack — suggest the Nazi is getting to him, corrupting him and making him a reflection of his prisoner.

The men both return to spartan surroundings after their sessions, Höss finishing up his untrustworthy memoir, Albert to a hotel room in 1946 Poland that’s little better than a cell itself.

This is how Pery runs with the “banality of evil” concept, suggesting its contagious, corrupting influence. It doesn’t take a big leap for Albert to act just a little like Höss, and he is chilled to the marrow when he realizes this.

“The Interrogation” is basically a simple two-hander, a drama almost wholly set at a table, listening to stories of camp life, the mass murderer’s attacks of conscience (after executing fellow Nazis), with Albert asking simple questions. The performances are as limited as the characters, mostly as confined as they are to their cells, their meetings and their narrow line of questioning.

It doesn’t cover any new ground on its subject. But in narrowing the focus to a bad man’s rationalizations to a possibly corruptible man interrogating him, Perry has made a quietly compelling Holocaust drama that uses words to paint pictures of the great horrors committed during this infamous time by evil as banal as dullards like Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sexual situations

Cast: Maciej Marczewski, Romanus Fuhrmann, Joan Blackham

Credits: Directed by Erez Pery, script by Sari Azoulay Turgeman and Erez Pery. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:24

Douglas Kirkland isn’t the first name to pop up when the Western world ponders photographers of the celebrated and powerful.

Leibowitz, Avedon, Ritts, Helmut Newton, maybe even Irving Penn if you’re into history.

Penn was something of a mentor to Kirkland, who came to photographing the worlds of fashion and the famous via photojournalism. He was one of the stars of the glory years of that profession, shooting famous photo essays for “Look” and “Life” magazines, documenting the Kennedy White House, Marilyn Monroe at her most playful and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton in the ’60s.

Those shots led the celeb and fashion mags to point him at generations of beautiful people whom he’d always take care “to show at their best.”

And as we watch him prep an elaborate, floral set transforming Elle Fanning into a fashion plate/flower child, hooting “Yes Yes YES, I LOVE it!” as he fires off frames once she shows up, we realize that the documentary about him, “That Click,” isn’t about past glories only.

He’s lasted into “an age when everybody photographs everything” thanks to his distinct, playful style, his enthusiasm, the “aura” he projects to those subjects in his process, an aura that comes out through the photos he produces, Nicole Kidman offers.

He’s been on the sets of 500 movies, from “The Sound of Music” and “Butch and Sundance” through Baz Luhrman’s “Moulin Rouge,” photographed Andy Garcia (interviewed here) and his model/actress daughter, bringing to every shoot a “romanticism” in creating images in poses and settings that many a movie cinematographer has noted what he’s done, and copied it for the film.

His many endorsements, from celebrities and peers, aside, “That Click” — it takes its title from the Kodak Brownie camera’s shutter sound which hooked him for life — isn’t a deep film, barely hinting at the absentee fatherhood, his personal life or his “photojournalist” bonafides.

Director Luca Severi’s film zeroes in on the beautiful people photographed beautifully, and barely troubles with anything else. Celluloid, large format or digital, the gorgeous can trust Kirkland to immortalize them in the most flattering light possible.

There’s plenty of those and plenty of that, and if that’s your thing, here’s an artist with a camera you should know about, the last of the post-Golden Age of Hollywood, pre-rock’n roll generation to make a mark.

MPA Rating: unrated

Cast: Douglas Kirkland, Sharon Stone, Elle Fanning, Michelle Williams, Herbie Hancock, Nicole Kidman, Andy Garcia

Credits: Directed by Luca Severi. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:30

A tepid period melodrama set against the backdrop of Czech history, “The Affair” might best be described as a movie about a house. That’s more accurate.

Czech director Julius Sevcík (“A Prominent Patient”) has made a film of Simon Mawer’s “The Glass Room,” and shot it in both English and Czech. Let’s hope it’s better in Czech.

It’s a more torpid than torrid tale of two wealthy friends, played by Carice van Hoeten and Hanna Alström, who flirt with being friends with benefits, only to have the Nazis interrupt that — leading to decades of sad, heartfelt letters of longing as one flees to Switzerland and the other is left behind to face personal degradation and national humiliation, and the Nazi abuse and misuse of the designer modernist house Liesl (Alström) left behind when she and her family fled.

It’s the sort of movie where a conversation drifts from what it’s like to “live in a masterpiece” to mildly unnerving chatter about what’s going on right across the border.

Hanna is the one who points out “We’re both married to Jews,” while Liesl is Mrs. “It won’t happen here.”

“Liesl, it’s happening 50 kilometers away!“

The film begins with the 1930s wedding of Liesl to Victor (Claes Bang) and the extravagant home she commissions from famous architect Von Abt (Karel Roden), with big glass windows and Onyx walls, filled with the latest in artwork and furniture destined to be included in the Museum of Modern Art as well.

The women, whose husbands are in business together, meet and share intimate conversations and friendship as their lives and families begin. One’s husband cheats with the nanny, which has consequences, but none that make us feel anything. Hanna must prostitute herself to a German aircraft designer (Roland Møller) to keep her and her husband from being deported.

“I am his whore,” she writes. This is how we live, an entire country doing what it must.”

Even that abusive relationship is bathed in blue light and pitched in a way that leaves the viewer cold.

Van Hoeten has been a European star since “Black Book,” and I can’t remember a performance of hers that moved me less.

The Swedish Alström, of the “Kingsmen” action comedies, is dry and distant as well. The leading ladies have little chemistry.

Bang (“The Square”) is on the periphery for much of the movie, with only a couple of heated moments to play.

Treating the history — 1930s to 1960s — as background noise lowers the stakes and renders the longing the women feel for each other’s company lukewarm throughout. The Holocaust, death, rape and wrenching separations recede as we refocus on what’s become of the house.

It has to work better as a novel because in the movie, that plays as heartless and hangs over the entire film, a pall that never clears and allows “The Affair” to bite, cut, sting or inflame.

MPA Rating: unrated, violent images, sex, some nudity

Cast: Carice van Hoeten, Hanna Alström, Claes Bang, Alexandra Borbély, Roland Møller and Martin Hoffman.

Credits: Directed by Julius Sevcík, script by Andrew Shaw, based on the novel “The Glass Room” by Simon Mawer. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:44

Um, okay.

“Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm” is a fine fun semi-scripted farce. Ripped Rudy a new one. But an Oscar contender?

No “News of the World” or “Another Round” or “The Father” or “emma.” Or “David Copperfield” or…what else do you see as missing?

“Mank” and “One Night in Miami” I wasn’t nuts about, but they at least have the scope and veneer of “Oscar contender” about them.

This might be your Best Picture field, but as all bets are off this Oscar season, that’s less likely than usual. No way in Hell a town full of actors will be backing a movie with only a couple of SAG members in it.

A rambling, generic mobster’s-rise-in-flashback story, with a ludicrous terrorism trial as its framework, actors ranging from competent to amateurish and most of them unable to hide their disengagement from the script, “Dutch” has it all.

And then you look at this slo-motion trainwreck’s IMDb page and see it’s the first film of a planned trilogy.

Take me now, Lord. And Lord, this Nashville-based “Faith Media Holdings” company that released this violent, N-word, F-bomb and C-word R-rated “thriller?” Which faith is that?

Lance Gross plays a Newark mob boss who imposes his case on a reluctant defense attorney (Natasha Marc) just as he’s arrested over their unscheduled lunch meeting.

Bernard James, aka “Dutch,” is charged with terrorism — conspiring to bomb a Newark police station, a bombing that killed 27 cops.

In America, that would be the media story of the year, a trial turned into a media circus. Here, there’s no press, a mostly-empty courtroom and some of the dullest, most tin-eared dialogue and most amateur performances this side of sophomore year projects at your average film school.

I don’t like to abuse actors, and as most everybody in these scenes sounds like they’re reading lines off cue cards, let’s just put that grimace aside.

Flashbacks prompted by testimony tell us the story of how he got his start, his early connection to a mobster creatively named Fat Tony (veteran character player Robert Costanzo), how he came by his nickname and the bloody mob intrigues that accompanied his rise — with an earlier stint in prison thrown in.

As thrillers go, there’s nothing thrilling in “Dutch.” Characters slow-walk through the action, stop and deliver speeches often packed with exposition, legal or illegal credentials of their characters.

The finale is laugh-out-loud low-energy over-the-top. The actors so-underreact that you’d swear they were watching the film rather than participating in its violent, life-threatening story. Onetime web phenom “Hot Felon” Jeremy Meeks is in this cast, and as inexperienced as he is on screen, he’s not remotely the worst actor in this.

Is this story headed towards some sort of religious conversion? In the remainder of the trilogy?

I’d settle for an apology for wasting my time.

MPA Rating: R for language throughout, violence, some drug use, sexual references and nudity

Cast: Lance Gross, Natasha Marc, Jeremy Meeks and Robert Costanzo

Credits: Directed by Preston A. Whitmore II, David Wolfgang, script by Preston A. Whitmore II, based on a novel by Teri Woods. A Faith Media (!?) release.

Running time: 1:43

There’s something going on in an abandoned mine in an emptied-out town in BFE, Kentucky. And the only person who can get our Cambridge scientist and his team there is a mysterious and hyper-competent Spanish guide.

No, “The Devil Below” isn’t another European horror story set in Appalachia and shot in Romania. But the casting, the fact that they pass off a Kentucky quarry and caves as “the Shookum mine,” and that it’s not so much a thriller set “below” as what is being kept below getting out and “up here” make it disorienting enough to be interesting.

Alicia Sanz of TV’s “El Cid” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” is Arianne, the woman with the gear and the Land Rover to get Darren (Adan Canto), his skeptical colleague Shawn (Chinaza Uche), security guy Jaime (Zach Avery) and tech-guy Terry (Jonathan Sadowski) to a place that’s literally been removed from the map.

Arianne has the swagger to not be put off when locals are hostile about giving her directions. To her, that just means “We’re close.”

Darren’s out to find out what’s still on fire far below ground, but Shawn, a geologist with an “intelligent design” bent thinks this sealed mine was a government Cold War project related to something the Russians found when they drilled down too deep — Hell. He’s even got a tape.

“Some say it’s the screams of the damned!”

Darren can gripe that “We’re not here to find the Hell. We’re here to to find holes and smoke” all he wants. We’ve seen that opening scene. We know a miner (Will Patton) saw his miner son yanked down a hole, never to be seen again.

Shawn? He’s the first to say “We shouldn’t be here, man.”

They dodge angry locals, find the entrance and open Pandora’s mine shaft. And that’s when Hell is let loose on Earth.

“The Devil Below” is at its best when our soon to shrink quintet is on the run, scrambling to figure out what’s chasing them and if the locals are there to help or make things worse.

The more we “see” the threat — which is much more menacing as a far-off growl and glimpsed through a night-vision scope — the more conventional and dull “The Devil Below” becomes.

There’s not much suspense, not much empathy built into the characters. We’re just treated to little speeches, bits of backstory revealed, big moments of personal sacrifice, grisly deaths, all shot in the gloom of night or shafts and caves “below.”

There’s a half-decent thriller in this plot, maybe even with this cast. But the minute you set aside most of your budget to show us “the creatures” in their various forms, you lose the thread. It’s not what we see that’s alarming, but what we sense. “The Devil Below” deserves a movie as resonant and harrowing as its title.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Alicia Sanz, Adan Canto, Chinaza Uche, Zach Avery, Jonathan Sadowski, and Will Patton

Credits: Directed by Bradley Parker, script by Eric Scherbarth and Stefan Jaworski. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:31

If there is a simple formula for making a movie you assume the horror audience will embrace, the British thriller “Sacrilege” lays it bare for all to see.

“Bare” as in nudity — discrete, teasing and of course female. And gay. Skinny dipping, makeup sex, that sort of thing.

It’s got nubile lesbians isolated and under attack in the British countryside in the Lands Where You Get No Cell Signal.

There’s a pagan cult because of course there is, a festival celebrating a veritable “Wicker Man,” this time with antlers and a deer’s skull. Well, it’s not exactly wicker — more weeds and twigs and such.

Throw in the silent, hulking groundskeeper (Rory Wilton) at Mabon Lodge and you’ve got the makings of 767 other horror movies, varying only in geography and casting.

David Creed’s formula picture fails to generate any real frights or suspense, despite hewing as closely to horror formula as any thriller in recent memory.

Four young professional Londoners — Tamaryn Payne, Emily Wyatt, Sian Abrahams, Naomi Willow — meet at Blake’s Bar, gay-friendly as it’s run by Blake (Abrahams), and decide the news that the man who attacked Kayla (Payne) got out of prison early is reason enough to skip off to the country for a weekend.

Social influencer Stacey (Willow) and Kayla’s “cheating” ex Trish (Wyatt) pile into the van with them for a little “getting silly again together” at an early fall getaway.

“Here’s to the women in their stiletto shoes, who make all the money and drink all the booze.”

They pick up a hitcher on his way to “the festival,” which they’re promised will have music. He turns up later, after they check in, to make sure they’re coming.

And once they go, there’s enough alcohol and potent weed to take away their inhibitions and make them ignore the old woman (Emma Spurgin Hussey) who warns them away, to not follow the instructions of Father (Ian Champion) who has everyone scribble down their greatest fear on a scrap of paper and toss it into the bonfire.

See where this is going? Yeah, me too.

The women keep separating, and as they do, their worst nightmares flash before their hallucinating (maybe) eyes. And they’re picked off in generally gruesome ways.

The foreshadowing could not be more obvious than the “let’s get naked” moments. The performances are D-movie desultory, even if the production values aren’t bad.

“Sacrilege” may very well have the formula that lures in viewers. But you’ve got to get creative with it, everybody on board has to buy in, and you need the talent and shooting, directing and editing skill to make it come together in a way that generates fear and suspense.

“Sacrilege” doesn’t defile a horror formula. It just shows us how following the recipe to the letter doesn’t always work.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Tamaryn Payne, Emily Wyatt, Sian Abrahams, Naomi Willow, Ian Champion, David English, Rory Wilton and Emma Spurgin Hussey

Credits: Scripted and directed by David Creed. A DevilWorks release.

Running time: 1:23

Here’s another project from the filmic pre-history of Peter Sellers, a little-seen if not “lost” comedy made his with fellow “Goon Show” castmates.

If the through-line of modern sketch comedy runs from the Goons to Monty Python to Second City and The Groundlings to “Saturday Night Live,” Kids in the Hall, “In Living Color,” Upright Citizens Brigade, Broken Lizard etc, where did the Goons draw their inspiration?

“Goon Show” radio recordings point to English Music Hall, simply sped-up and given a surreal twist. The 1951 debut “Goons” film, “Penny Points to Paradise” has that in excess, beginning right from the opening credits.

The film is peppered with Bob Hope-ish one-liners.

A chatty landlady merits “I bet she was vaccinated with a gramophone needle!”

“The blunt end?”

“No, probably in the arm.”

Scads and scads of these bubble from our “heroes” — played by Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, founding members of the radio program, which had just begun broadcasting as “Crazy People” and devolved into “The Goon Show.”

Secombe plays a football pool (lotto) winner googly-eyed Milligan is his equally out-of-his-depth mate returning to their favorite dumpy hotel in Brighton, even though Harry’s hit it rich.

“The old place hasn’t changed, has it?” “Nooo. Not even the sheets.”

But as this farce, about forgers setting out to substitute their winnings with counterfeit five pound notes, gets going and Sellers shows up in a couple of roles (a fast-talking Canadian salesman, and the dotty, harrumphing “Major”), we’re treated to a lot of silent screen comedy — mime, fast-motion chases, slapstick golf and the like — all accompanied by a tinkly spinet piano score, just like you’d hear at the nickelodeon.

Even in an era when TV was emerging and vaudeville (in the US) and English Music Hall vets were its early stars, the film probably felt corny and dated the moment it hit the screen.

The band? “Felix Mendelssohn and his Hawaiian Serenaders.”

But if you’re a “completist,” trying to sample all the performers who shaped comedy for generations all across the English-speaking world, this one fills in a few more blanks.

MPA Rating: None at all.

Cast:  Harry Secombe, Spike Milligan, Vicky Page, Peter Sellers, Alfred Marks, Paddie O’Neil

Credits: Directed by Anthony Young, script by John Ormonde. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:11

There is no “bomb” in the Disney Universe, not with all those streaming subscriptions and upcharges to take the edge off.

Still opening at a little over half what “Tom & Jerry” did is a bad look. $8.6 million.

“Boogie” barely registered, a decent film that only cashed in with $1.2.

The epic fail of the weekend has to be “Chaos Walking,” years delayed, reshoots included, weak reviews (it’s watchable and forgettable) maybe $100 million sink into it, only $3.8 and no streaming safety net in sight.

Imagine “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” or “Rock’n Rolla” set in a world of Colombian gangsters.

Some have colorful names, many have down and dirty secrets and nobody’s shy about spilling blood.

That’s “Dogwashers,” a Carlos Moreno thriller with lots of tell-tale borrowed Guy Ritchie visual flourishes, just as Brit Ritchie borrowed from Spaghetti Westerns and Hong Kong shoot-em-ups.

It’s a dark comedy that could use a lot more comedy. And it’s a Ritchie homage that fails to copy the most important ingredient in such bloody romps — speed. This ungainly beast lurches along when it needs to sprint. It’s slow — like a stoner Guy Ritchie mob comedy.

Moreno tells a convoluted story of rival mobs, a ruthless younger thug leaning on the older, failing Don Oscar (Christian Tappan) and his minions. After a machete slashing blood-spattered prologue, he identifies the cast of characters, from the mob leaders down to the aged gardener and the gardener’s grandson, and the mob’s sumo-sized dog washer, Jobolitro (Ulises Gonzalez) in the opening credits.

One of those minions is cheating with Don Oscar’s wife (Isabella Litch). But Don Oscar is cheating all over town, and not above killing a mistress if he suspects treachery. As the cops have moved in next door to the sprawling, tumbledown mansion he’s taken over, and he owes money to this younger rival, he suspects everyone.

His paranoia isn’t helped by heavy middle-aged-man meth use.

The rival Dubernay is hellbent on collecting his cash. Then again, maybe not. He’s a sadist and seems to enjoy killing Don Oscar’s footsoldiers.

“We are crooks,” he shrugs at one in that opening scene. “Crooks solve problems this way.”

So Don Oscar’s got a decision to make, is fretting over the “workmen” he realizes are cops at the property next door, had mistresses to see and drugs to smoke. And all those around him are trapped in his slow-motion slide into annihilation.

“Slow motion” describes the 107 minute movie, too. There’s a literal ticking clock of peril closing in around them and Moreno’s script is intent on showing this or that bit of sex, throwing in more subplots about stolen mob money and several characters having the dream of using that cash to “get out.”

The elements are here to make a pretty good expectations-flipping farce with firearms. But Moreno, who appears to intend this as a period piece (’90s phones, ’80s and older beat-up cars and trucks), slow-walks everything.

What’s worse, he gives us no one to really root for. Sure, the big guy washes the dogs and goes to church. Sure, the gardener’s grandson is looking at no future at all. But do we develop real empathy for them, or any of the double-crossers arrayed against them?

Our director conjures up an ugly, sweaty, fly-infested world of pigs who eat, groom, kill and copulate like pigs. His characters have a hint of “character” about them. They could have been funnier, more outlandish. But none of that matters when the comic thriller they’re in has all the moves of a Galapagos tortoise.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, explicit sex, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Anderson Ballesteros, Ulises Gonzalez, Christian Tappan, Jhon Álex Toro, Isabella Litch

Credits: Directed by Carlos Moreno. A 64-A Film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:47