Movie Nation

“In the Shadow of Iris” is a tight and twisty French thriller about a kidnapping gone wrong.

Sexy casting and a taste of kink dress up this tale that begins conventionally, throws its first sleight-of-hand trick at us, and saves a few more for the third act.

Iris has lunch at a fancy Paris restaurant with her older banker husband, Antoine. She steps out to have a smoke while he pays the bill. He comes out into the rain and she’s vanished.

As Antoine (Jalil Lespert, who also directed) frantically searches the place, calls her cell and starts to panic, she (Charlotte Le Bon) turns up — at a garage. Money changes hands. Max (Romain Duris) ties her up, and we start to see the scheme that’s afoot.

The ransom demand is what makes Antoine call the cops (Camille Cottin, Adel Bencherif). As they start to dig in, we start to puzzle this thing out with them. What’s really going on here?

“A woman can’t disappear in the middle of the day without someone seeing her,” the captain (Cottin) muses (in French with English subtitles), “unless she PLANNED it.”

The cops stake out the ransom payout, things go wrong and the circle of suspects widen. Max the mechanic grapples with why he’s been brought into all this, and the plot thickens.

Director Lespert (“Yves St. Laurent” was his) keeps the story compact, even as he and his co-writers muddy the waters and clutter the lives we look in on. Max is divorced, behind on child support and not the most reliable babysitter The cops have complicated sex lives, as does almost everybody else.

Flashbacks start to unravel the story, but not quickly. Oh no.

I like the battle of wits that sets in among the various protagonists, underestimating each other, under or over confident at every turn.

Duris (“All the Money in the World”) is rough-hewn enough to suggest a man who has struggled in menial jobs, and with life, leaning on native cunning that he may not possess.

Le Bon (“The Hundred Foot Journey”) is quite good at giving us a poker-faced enigma, and is a reminder that Paris is lousy with gorgeous, long-haired model-thin French brunettes.

Lespert the actor lets us see the schemer given to panic in Antoine, and matches up nicely with the other principals.

It doesn’t play entirely fair, and some of the “clutter” slows it down, here and there. But rare is the thriller that keeps tripping you up all the way to the closing credits. That makes this “Shadow” worth shining a little light on.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, sex, profanity, smoking

Cast: Romain Duris, Jalil Lespert, Charlotte Le Bon, Adel Bencherif, Camille Cottin and Hélène Barbry

Credits: Directed by Jalil Lespert, script by Andrew Bovell, Jérémie Guez and Jalil Lespert. A Netflix/Universal video release.

Running time: 1:39

We could use a little daft right about now.

But we have to wait, eh? Oct. 23? Amazon that.

Graham Greene’s been a favorite of mine among character actors for years — going back to “Dances with Wolves,” “Northern Exposure,” on through “Transamerica” and “Wind River.”

He’s made a career of playing sages with a touch of whimsy, often Native American (First Nations, as he’s a Canadian member of the Oneida Tribe).

He’s pretty much the sole saving grace of “Tar,” clumsy horror comedy set around LA’s famed La Brea Tar Pits. It’s got maybe two laughs in it, and half as many frights.

The hook here is that there’s tar underneath wide swaths of Los Angeles, they’re always digging and stumbling into it, and that not everything that fell into this prehistoric ooze was killed, leaving only its bones behind.

Co-writer/director and star Aaron Wolf hasn’t directed or acted in anything that’s grabbed anybody’s attention. And his inability to project terror, or even keep a straight face the first time his character Zachary spies “The Man of the Tar” creature in “Tar” kind of explains why.

Zachary and his Dad (Timothy Bottoms, of “Last Picture Show” fame) and employee Marigold (Tiffany Shepis) and Zach’s pal Ben (Sandy Danto) are racing to pack up and vacate the family “repair” business (There’s zero evidence that there’s anything here that could “repair” anything.). They’ve been evicted.

Ben is the sort of lump that gets things rolling in a horror movie with a “Did you see THAT?”

You’re being paranoid.

“YOU’RE paranoid…It felt like the building burped!”

Something is out there, crawling out of the ooze, maybe the something that the homeless guy, Carl (Greene) tells tourists about at the entrance to the Tar Pits, right across the street from this soon-to-be-demolished office building.

“And then I saw things people don’t want to see,” yarn-spinner Carl intones.

Also among those imperiled this night — Zach’s girlfriend (Emily Peachey), the self-consciously busty accountant down the hall (Nicole Alexandra Shipley) and the accountant’s secretary (Dani Fernandez).

There’s some shrieking and some oozing and a little “I save your life, you make out with me” and “I’ve got this all under control.”

None of it’s funny, nothing here is the least bit frightening.

Wolf squandered production money on pointless pop songs (“Sedona”) for the soundtrack, and screen time on random shots of LA construction projects.

The picture is inert. And there are all these inserts, Wolf in close-up in pretty bad makeup telling “the story” of that night to unseen interrogators. Every film has a whiff of “vanity project” about it. Sometimes, that “vanity” makes you wince.

There’s a whole lot of going nowhere slowly going on here. You might be tempted to make a “stuck-in-the-titular-tar” crack about the pacing, but I’m above that.

Let’s just say this is seriously inept and leave it at that.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Aaron Wolf, Tiffany Shepis, Nicole Alexandra Shipley, Sandy Danto, Emily Peachey, Timothy Bottoms and Graham Greene.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Wolf, script by Timothy Nuttall and Aaron Wolf. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:37

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, near nudity, profanity

Cast: Aaron Wolf, Tiffany Shepis, Nicole Alexandra Shipley, Sandy Danto, Emily Peachey, Timothy Bottoms and Graham Greene.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Wolf, script by Timothy Nuttall and Aaron Wolf. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:37

The last reaction I expected the new screen adaptation of “The Boys in the Band” to provoke was indifference. But Tony winner or not, 50th anniversary film remake be damned, there isn’t a whole lot that this stagebound opening of a time capsule brings to 2020.

The great stage director Joe Mantello treats it as the period piece it is, and there’s a refreshing blast of “Look how far we’ve come” as a culture and subculture about it.

Jim Parsons does a passable job of toning down his sing-songy sitcom line readings in the “Big Bang” past.

And Zachory Quinto is acrid and brilliant, and entirely too dashing to be a convincing “32 year old ugly, pock-marked Jew fairy.”

But this production never quite escapes the label of “relic of an utterly binary and bygone era.” A pre-Stonewall/pre-AIDS play and movie(s), its weary gay stereotypes feel positively quaint half a century on.

A 1969ish Greenwich village birthday party brings everyone in their circle to motor-mouthed Michael’s (Parsons) apartment.

First to arrive is Donald (Matt Bomer), Michael’s sometime paramour, and “a model fairy,” whatever that means. He doesn’t live in the city, so he’s the one who has a ’68 MGB convertible.

Emory (Robin de Jesus, funny) is flamboyantly swishy and dishy and ulfiltered. He’s arranged a somewhat dimwitted “escort” dressed (badly) as “Midnight Cowboy” (Charlie Carver, amusing) gift for the guest of honor.

Bernard (Michael Benjamin Washington) and the bickering couple Larry (Andrew Rannells), who is always on the make, and his wounded older lover Hank (Tuc Watkins) and the rest have gathered to fete Harold (Quinto), fated to make a late arrival to his own party.

The inciting incident of the evening is a panicked, weepy call from Michael’s college roomie. Michael makes every effort to brush Alan (Brian Hutchinson) off, meet him for lunch, etc. Michael hadn’t come out in college. Alan “doesn’t know.” And the last thing Michael wants to do is subject the man to “screaming queens singing ‘Happy Birthday.'”

He thinks he’s succeeded, and then “straight” Alan shows up anyway, mid-party. His arrival is the film’s most chilling scene, Whatever this wife-and-children businessman was crying about on the phone, his entrance takes everybody, on screen and off, back to the closeted era, with embarrassed eye contact, awkward small talk and pained secret “shame.”

Well, everybody save for Emory.

“He’s about as straight as the Yellow Brick Road.”

I’ve seen “Boys” on the stage and the original William Friedkin film version (more stage-bound than this), and what sticks with you is the bitterness that the last third of the story serves up. The regret over lives lived as lies, love affairs that must kept secret, “happiness” denied still stings.

Harold and Michael’s melodramatic war of wills, bullying each other, the other guests, the “dumb” Cowboy and hapless Alan with demands that they all take unblinking looks in the mirror? That feels very “the kindness of strangers” arch and archaic.

“Beware the hostile fag,” Harold viperously purrs. “When he’s sober, he’s dangerous. When he drinks, he’s lethal.””

Except nobody comes off as drunk. Too many of the characters never stop feeling like “camp” characters, even Parsons and Quinto.

And all the Judy Garland, Maria Montez, TWA and Fire Island references circle us back around to that early impression, the one these “Boys” never shake — “quaint” and “relic.”

MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and drug use

Cast: Jim Parsons, Matt Bomer, Robin de Jesus, Andrew Rannells, Michael Benjamin Washington, Charlie Carver, Tuc Watkins, Brian Hutchinson and Zachory Quinto

Directed by Joe Mantello, script by Mart Crowley and Ned Martel, based on Crowley’s play and the 1970 screenplay. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:01

Eees teaser for trailer.

Trailer later today.

“The Keeper” is a stately, sturdy to the edge of stolid film biography of Bert Trautmann, legendary and beloved goalie for Manchester City soccer from the late ’40s into the 1960s.

It’s what he did before that career that makes his story different. Trautmann was a German paratrooper interned in Britain as a POW, recruited to put on the boots for a local British club before the war was over. And although the film goes to some pains to address the former Hitler Youth member and Iron Cross-awarded military volunteer past, showing attacks of conscience and regret, I can’t say the Nazi-washing feels complete.

You could certainly understand the mass protests when he came on to play goal for Man City in 1949, something director Marcus H. Rosenmüller’s film takes pains to show.

David Kross (“The Reader,” “War Horse”) is Trautmann, captured in early 1945 and sent to a camp in Lancashire. A comrade assures him “We have Nazi discipline in this camp,” a threat designed to keep the prisoners committed to the cause.

As Sgt. Smythe (Harry Melling) would just as soon dig “a mass grave for you bastards,” maintaining that hate for the enemy shouldn’t be difficult.

But gruff grocer Jack (John Henshaw) spies the Aryan blond in goal for a camp team, and thinks he could help St. Helen’s A.C. avoid the dreaded “relegation,” being kicked down to a lower level of British football.

“Play football. Keep your gob shut. Stumm (mute).”

And Jack’s got a daughter Trautmann’s noticed, the fiery redhead Margaret, played by Freya Mavor.

That looks like an offer “Bert” can’t turn down. But he won’t hide the fact that he’s a “Jerry” from his teammates, won’t let Jack bully him into thinking “I’m doing YOU a favor.” And he’s not likely to get anywhere with Margaret. If onl;y he could hear her tirade to her Dad at his little stunt.

“He’s a bloody NAZI. He raised his arm and yelled ‘Heil Hitler” like the rest.”

As Bert bargains his way into off-camp work at Jack’s grocery, Margaret makes the case for not forgiving and forgetting in no uncertain terms.

“You lot” she fumes, killed friends and family and “robbed us of our youth.”

She’ll come round. “Fraternizing with the enemy” or not, if you’ve ever seen a screen romance, you know the stations of the genre cross.

There are any number of points “The Keeper” could dropped the curtain, but this script takes Trautmann well into his professional career, diving into the controversy he stirred up, the firestorm he dealt with in the press.

It takes pains to show Trautmann’s attacks of conscience, the flashbacks that answer the ugly questions of “what you did (or didn’t do) in the war.”

The best scenes aren’t those flashbacks, but the Sgt’s determination to show a concentration camp made by the victorious allies to “re-educate” the “Good Germans” who survived the war, in Germany and in POW camps, and in the way the news the war had ended is broken to the defeated.

The soccer is the usual half-speed variety you see in the movies, and the love story, no matter how slowly the filmmakers think they’re taking it, feels abrupt — more pre-ordained than organic.

The briefest glance at Wikipedia reveals events that are conflated, details left out.

And frankly, setting up the Nazi in the camp dynamic and not doing more with Bert’s “fraternization with the English” is a cheat.

But the spot-on period detail and the performances carry this off. Henshaw gives the supporting cast — mostly British TV veterans — heft and heart, and Kross and Mavor have enough chemistry to let it work.

This isn’t an A-picture, either behind the camera or in front of it. It plays like a competent TV film, lacking the polish or “names” of a “Downton Abbey,” but good enough to work.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: David Kross, Freya Mavor, John Henshaw, Harry Melling, Dervla Kirwan, Chloe Harris and Gary Lewis.

Credits: Directed by Marcus H. Rosenmüller, script by Marcus H. Rosenmüller, Nicholas J. Schofield. A Menemsha release.

Running time: 1:58

It’s Coppola and Robert Evans and Paramount and Puzo and the battle to make a masterpiece. This could be fun.

https://deadline.com/2020/09/the-godfather-making-of-movie-oscar-isaac-francis-coppola-jake-gyllenhaal-robert-evans-barry-levinson-francis-and-the-godfather-1234588678/

Loud, manic, cute and colorful, nobody’ll confuse the Spanish comedy “A Remarkable Tale (Lo nunca visto)” for high art.

But the acting’s fun. And this goofy riff on long-held prejudices, cultural decay and immigration fills the bill if you’re looking for an undemanding film of the “feel good” school of comedy.

High in the Pyrenees in the north of Spain sits the town of Fuentejuela. But our story isn’t set there. It takes place among the crumbling houses, “for sale” signs and decay of Upper Fuentejuela, a village up the mountain from the main town.

It’s “a dead-end town of old people with hideous sweaters,” one self-aware local laments. No doctor, no priest, no snowplow service on a regular basis.

They’re down to 16 souls, and about to lose their “village” census status. “Annexation” is what the mayor “down below” (Paco Tous) harps on. But not if Teresa (veteran comic actress Carmen Machi) and her friend Jaime (Pepón Nieto) have any say in the matter.

Ditched and betrayed by her husband, who moved off the mountain, she’s planning to run for mayor. Jaime is a budding chef who created a signature tart for everybody in the village to make and sell to tourists.

But there are no tourists. And then, these four Africans in pre-colonization tribal wear show up. They’re on the run, dangerously under-dressed for the snowy weather. The Civil Guard is after “four colored individuals.”

The villagers are alarmed. Break out the shotguns! “They’re dangerous, ALL of them,” they bellow (in Spanish with English subtitles). “And UGLY!”

The Africans, whom Teresa and we, the viewer, are allowed to assume are a dance troupe hoping to emigrate, don’t alarm her. Jaime? Sure. But after some adorable language barrier moments, she sees Shukra and Latisha (Ricardo Nkosi, Montse Pla) and Calulu and Azquil (Jimmy Castro and Malcolm Treviño-Sitté) as less of a problem and more of a solution.

“They’re good. And tall. And handsome. Really handsome.

If only she can convince the intolerant and the insensitive around her to see it as she does. Sure, it’ll be “as easy as finding a black guy in the snow.”

OK.

The Africans are mistrusting, saying the same thing about “the whites” that many of the locals are saying about them. Well, not EXACTLY the same things.

“They’re here to take our chickens…our WOMEN!”

Old Paco may wave the shotgun, but Jaime’s mom just wants to know who’d want to emigrate to “this s—hole village?”

Can everybody learn to get along, and quickly enough for a funeral, a festival and the village’s clumsy medieval dance demonstration?

At least the hippy running a failing hippy “commune” (Jon Kortajarena) can’t be racist, right? Well not as racist?

“Hey, I have a tattoo of Bob Marley hugging Nelson Mandela! I CAN’T be racist.”

I laughed a few times at this, winced a few other times. There are two sharp observations about the nature and misguided origins of cultures clashing. Dying European villages like this that recognize the need to “Integrate or die” are popping up in Italy and elsewhere.

And ingrained cultural supremacy has been beaten into generations of Europeans and Americans from childhood. You’ll never use “Clean your plate. They are children starving in Africa” with a straight face and clear conscience again.

This isn’t all that “remarkable,” but “A Remarkable Tale” stays upbeat and positive, and manages to have a little fun with a subject that’s roiled the world for a decade. Cute or not, that’s saying something.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, profanity, adult situations

Cast: Carmen Machi, Pepón Nieto, Kiti Mánver, Montse Pla, Ricardo Nkosi, Jimmy Castro, Jon Kortajarena and Malcolm Treviño-Sitté

Credits: Written and directed by Marina Seresesky. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

We see the threat long before she does.

But Margo “Maggie” Crane (Kenadi DelaCerna) is 15, growing up without a mother in the pre-Internet 1970s of Northern Michigan. Her Native American Dad (Tatanka Means) taught her how to work the river, fish and hunt. He never warned her about the uncle next door.

And Margo, after taking the “Wanna go huntin’ with me?” bait, doesn’t recoil at Uncle Cal’s (Coburn Goss) sexual aggression. She leans into it. Curious? Flattered? Turned on?

The fury this act rains down on him — from her dad, Cal’s brother-in-law, and Cal’s enraged family doesn’t seem to register with the teenager. Until she breaks out her Winchester .22 and shoots Cal, escalating matters in ways she could never foresee.

“Once Upon a River” is a drab, downbeat indie period piece built on impulsive, stupid decisions and irrational and emotionally unmotivated reactions to their consequences.

The shooting that upends Margo’s life doesn’t tear her up in ways we can see. She’s got a gun and backwoods skills, access to a rowboat and a mother who ran out on her years before she can try to track down. She can take to the woods. The guilt, fear and anger we might see in a more interesting performance simply isn’t in DelaCerna’s tool kit.

The coming-of-age-on-the-lam story swims or sinks on her performance and every limp plot contrivance musician-turned-writer-director Harloua Rose throws in Margo’s path. And there’s a whole lot of sinking going on.

Rose keeps the look late-fall and wintry and the tone dour, with little moments of magical plot-engineering that promise to house and feed our heroine whenever the chips are down.

She lays low with “safe” friends of her father, meets a sensitive hunky Native writer/adventurer (Ajuawak Kapashesit) just when she needs to, a dying, kindly old coot (John Ashton) at the perfect moment, and even her mom (“True Blood’s” Lindsay Pulsipher, the stand-out in the cast) promises to solve every grim 15 year-old problem her daughter finds herself facing.

We see her dressing wildlife she’s going to eat. But this “camping” she’s doing? The survivalist/live-by-your-wits part of the tale is shortchanged.

DelaCerna’s take on Maggie is timid, as meek and passive as the “pip pip” of her .22, which she brings down deer with. Hey, it’s a movie.

And that rape scene is…seriously 1977 and problematic. Did I mention she’s 15?

The basic ingredients of something gripping, tense and heartfelt, and in an unusual setting and culture, are here. Our director/cook spoiled the stew, with a lot of help from her miscast-cast main ingredient.

MPAA Rating: unrated, rape, gun violence, alcohol abuse

Cast: Kenadi DelaCerna, John Ashton, Tatanka Means, Coburn Goss, Sam Straley, Kenn E. Head and Lindsay Pulsipher

Credits: Written and directed by Haroula Rose, based on a book by Bonnie Jo Campbell. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:32

October 26, this “continuation” of the teen hotties as witches cult hit is available to stream or purchase outright.

Black lipstick is totally back.