Movie Nation

The Danish mini-series “When the Dust Settles” invites a sweeping generalization, if you compare it to most English language limited-run dramatic TV series. Typically, your average Northern European program of this sort demands more from the viewer.

It’s not just the language barrier and the unfamiliarity of the cast to North American viewers. There’s a density to the writing, a teasing out of facts, a complexity in the plot wrinkles. “Dust,” a ten-episode tale of a Copenhagen terrorist attack, its prelude and aftermath, produces more “Well, I didn’t see THAT comings” that anything I’ve seen this year.

Creators Dorte Warnøe Høgh and Ida Maria Rydén give up their details grudgingly, from the names of the dozen or so principal characters to their interconnections, the things that bring them to that restaurant that gunmen shoot up on that fateful night.

Even the shooting itself, glimpsed in a noisy, horrific blur in the opening episode and revisited, in bits and pieces, until “the night of” five episodes in, has much concealed. Seeing it play out in agonizing real time in that fifth installment is heart breaking. Revisiting the mass murder in the episodes that follow often just as heart-breaking.

Although producers of series everywhere face the common failings of such programs — dragging things out, turning a 4-8 installment serialization into 10, no matter how much filler they have to include — and even the best series stumble into artifice and cheating (not playing fair with the “mystery,” here) “When the Dust Settles” maintains suspense almost to the very end.

It’s the most gripping series I’ve binged this year, and I’ve abandoned far more than I’ve actually deigned to review.

The characters we meet are a wide swath of Danish society.

Elisabeth (Karen-Lise Mynster) is Justice Minister/Attorney General in the conservative Danish government, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor nursing a very liberal, anti-internment camp refugees bill through parliament. She is retirement age, determined to make this bill her crowning achievement before spending her twilight years with wife Stina (Lotte Anderson).

Ginger (Katinka Lærke Petersen) is a homeless addict lost in “the system.” Yes, she’s got a “story.”

Nikolaj (Peter Christoffersen) is a meticulous, callous chef from Greenland (ethnically Inuit/Danish) whose empathy issues scream “on the spectrum.” He’s just taken over the restaurant in a kitchen coup, renamed it “Hog” and centered it around pork.

Jamal (Arian Kashef) is a rattled, impressionable and bullied young member of Denmark’s Muslim community, which may see an eatery focusing on pigs and named “Hog” as an affront.

Morten (Jacob Lohmann) is the plumber who charges into Hog in his underwear, frantic to find his self-absorbed druggy son Albert (Elias Budde Christensen) who works there.

Marie (Viola Martinsen) is a child who turns nine on the night of the attack, a little girl already afraid of being alone, a real trial for her waitress/single-mom Louise (Filippa Suenson).

Lisa (Malin Crépin) is a Swedish pop star reaching an age where she wants something more than touring, recording and a marriage of professional convenience.

Holger (Henning Jensen) is a grumpy old nursing home resident, estranged from his children. His answer to “Anything else you need (in Danish, with English subtitles)” from the staff there is his mantra.

“Get me a gun so I can blow my brains out!”

The series reveals how these characters connected or stumbled into one another in the days leading up to the shooting and revels in the issues each is wrestling with.

Every character has an arc. They begin in one place, personally, and find themselves changed — sometimes for better, often not — by the terror and trauma they experience.

As stories unfold in flashbacks and flash-forwards, we see the extremes the justice minister will go to in order to protect her “bill,” the trials of the plumber, whose school-teacher wife (Julie Agnete Vang) is more worried about chasing their no-good son away than in reining him in, the long list of enemies the emotionally-lacking chef has made, the pressures Jamal faces in a stressed, scrambling-to-get-by Palestinian family run by his tyrannical brother (Manmeet Singh) and the nightmare homelessness is, even in a socialist state where housing will be provided, so long as you’re “in the system.”

Ginger seeks companionship, maybe even affection, from Elliot (Simon Bennebjerg).

“Me? I’m an addict,” he says, matter-of-factly. “I’ll be dead in a few years. You need to get back to your real life.”

Some of the Danish “police procedural” stuff can feel a bit clumsy and theatrical. If you mutter “They can’t be that naive” here and there, you’re not alone in that reaction.

But the writing is crisp, clean and quotable. It’s all beautifully played, with even characters far down the credits given nuance, complications and agendas.

A lot of the most intriguing European series are turning up on First Look’s Topic. “When the Dust Settles” is another argument for adding that network/streamer to your video menu.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Karen-Lise Mynster, Jacob Lohmann, Malin Crépin, Peter Christoffersen, Katinka Lærke Petersen, Arian Kashef, Henning Jensen, Filippa Suenson, Viola Martinsen and Lotte Andersen

Credits: Created by Dorte Warnøe Høgh, Ida Maria Rydén. A Topic release.

Running time: 10 episodes @56 minutes each

Maybe it was my recent viewing/reviewing of the “‘Showgirls” Reconsidered documentary “You Don’t Nomi” that stopped me in my channel-surfing tracks when I saw the name “Joe Eszterhas” on the credits to a movie I’d missed.

Yes, “Telling Lies in America” has Kevin Bacon in it, and yes, it’s about radio in the Golden Age of disc jockeying (the early ’60s), both of which pique my interest.

But for morbid fascination, there’s nothing quite like reconsidering the blustery, BS-flinging, self-promoting Hollywood “type” that Eszterhas, who scripted “Showgirls” and “Jagged Edge” and “Basic Instinct” and “Flashdance” and “Sliver” and “Jade,” might be the best representative of.

His scripts were “high concept” gimmicky, often violent, drenched with “forbidden fruit” sexuality and lurid settings and/or characters that various directors exploited to the hilt in the vapid ’80s lingering into the ’90s. And Eszterhas made sure we knew who “wrote” them, a self promoting blowhard in the Bret Ratner/Weinstein/Bigelow/Seagal/Wahlberg or Cameron mold, a “type” that’s been obvious in Hollywood since being fictionalized in “What Makes Sammy Run?” way back in filmdom’s “Golden Age.”

A little talent, a lot of bragging and an endless blizzard of often self-mythologizing lies can take you far in showbusiness. Always has, always will.

“Telling Lies,” a semi-autobiographical tale of an immigrant lad (Brad Renfro) coming of age in Cleveland in the early 1960s, was pretty much the end of the line for “the highest paid screenwriter in America,” as Eszterhas billed himself then and even now.

The career-crippling debacle of “Showgirls,” his infamous feud with the then “the most powerful man (agent) in Hollywood,” Michael Ovitz, meant that the hustling newspaper reporter turned screenwriter could only land a no-name director and almost zero distribution for this self-indulgent “portrait.” Nobody saw it.

Eszterhas had only the ignominy of the self-produced “Burn, Hollywood Burn: An Alan Smithee Film” yet to come, putting the final nail in his Hollywood coffin while at the same time once and for all puncturing the balloon of the myth he’d invented to surround himself.

But here’s the script where he tried to “explain” himself — foreign-born striver, a bullied nobody who wants to be somebody, a teen who has a little trouble with English (something Renfro, playing the Eszterhas-ish Karchy Jonas, fails to get across) and absolutely no trouble at all lying on the fly.

This is the “real” Eszterhas? I can totally see it.

Karchy’s dream is to get into the “Students Hall of Fame” that new DJ in town Billy Magic (Bacon) pushes on his radio show, a popularity contest that a kid like Karchy was born to “fix.” As we’ve seen Billy skulk into town like a snail leaving a slime trail, we know they’re destined to be together.

That’s the way of Eszterhas scripts. Things just “are.” They’re fated. They don’t have to make any sense. A dirty DJ fired from stations all over America? Sure, fella. Take evenings and weekends in a powerhouse station in the Birthplace of Rock’n Roll.

Karchy’s dad, the woefully miscast Maximilian Schell (25 years too old to be this kid’s dad, and acting like it), used to be “a doctor” back in the Old Country (Eastern Europe). Now, father and son dream of passing the test to become American citizens.

One person standing in the way of that is the priest (Paul Dooley) of the pricey Catholic school Karchy attends. He’s wise to the kid’s endless lies. It doesn’t help that the rich jock (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) mercilessly bullies the kid. Karchy cuts classes and is on the verge of flunking out.

He’s equally sloppy at his after-school job, in the poultry department at a big market, where he pines for “slightly” older woman Diney (Calista Flockhart, on the cusp of “Ally McBeal”) and ignores the hectoring of his boss (Luke Wilson).

Karchy’s go-to bluff; at school, work or being interviewed for an “assistant” job with Billy Magic, is “Sure, LOTSA times.” Ever had sex? Ever been on a date? Ever been in a Cadillac? Ever driven a car?

“Sure. LOTSA times.”

The corrupt Karchy, newly-nicknamed “Chucky,” falls in with the corrupt and corrupting Billy and all of a sudden the world is his oyster.

Eszterhas revisits the Bill Cosby-approved “Spanish Fly” aphrodisiac of the era. The kid tries it on Diney, gets her sick and damned if she doesn’t brush that off and remain “friends.” A lot of film critics rolled their eyes at sleazy, sexist garbage like this that turned up in film after film with the Eszterhas name on the credits. A lot of female critics, actresses and others, loathed him for that very reason.

His hero stands up to the bully just once, and we’re treated to the sad spectacle of Rhys Myers and Renfro tangling in the boy’s room. Film buffs will remember that one pugilist-actor killed himself a few years later, and the other tried to kill himself a few years after that.

Bacon is at his oiliest here. He had a nice run of villains in the ’90s, and while this isn’t one of the great ones — Billy is just taking money under the table from record companies and pop star managers, signing talent to one-sided contracts to make them “a star” — Bacon makes sure we smell the excess cologne and hair product.

The seeds of the screenwriter’s destruction were planted long before this attempt at turning “sentimental.” Audiences tired of the irrational characters, over-the-top sexuality, ludicrous turns of phrase in the dialogue. These “characters” could only exist in an Eszterhas world, and that world was changing.

He would’ve been crucified on the Hollywood sign had he stuck around into the #MeToo era. “Sleazy” doesn’t quite cover his films’ reputations. “Rapey” is closer to the mark.

Still, if you know his canon and remember his headline-grabbing rep — the Madonna, Roseanne and Kanye of screenwriting — “Telling Lies in America” kind of explains it all.

Maybe the next time he grabs a headline — which he does by announcing a “comeback” in faith-based films (HAH), or wants to revisit his infamy by reviving “Showgirls” or the talking up the Ovitz feud anew — nobody will fall for it.

Same old Eszterhas. Same line of “Sure, LOTSA times” BS.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sex related situations

Cast: Kevin Bacon, Brad Renfro, Calista Flockhart, Maximilian Schell and Luke Wilson.

Credits: Directed by Guy Ferland, script by Joe Eszterhas. A Shout! Factory release.

Running time: 1:41

There’s something about the rugged, rawboned Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau that says “ex-con.” We see it, when we can get past the “Game of Thrones” persona HBO made for him. And he sees it, which is why he’s made a couple of movies playing just that sort of character.

“Shot Caller” was, if not a break-out, at least a streaming hit that cashed-in on his “GOT” fame and fan club. Not all that, but being the hot new premium TV star of the moment, it proved he can draw an audience and good actors to be in his supporting cast.

“Small Crimes,” the ex-con noir that preceded that, was a proof-of-concept picture, and something of an over-reach. It’s dark and twisted, and his character is thoroughly amoral. Coster-Waldau can pull the man-of-violence capable of superficial charm thing off.

But one gets the impression this E.L. Katz (“Cheap Thrills”) adaptation of a David Zelxterman novel is supposed to be funny, here and there. It, and Coster-Waldau, aren’t, despite his best efforts.

It’s right there in the opening scene, a convict we can see right through bluffing his way through remorse, repentance and rehabilitation in a meeting with the prison chaplain.

One last thing. Want to take confession before you go?

“Nah. I’m good.”

Just like that, Joe Denton is back out in the world, back in Bradley County (filmed in suburban Montreal), back with his wary parents (the wonder Jacki Weaver and Robert Forster), ready to reconnect with his ex-wife and two-daughters.

They’ve dropped out of sight, although a quick trip to the library lets him track them down. No, they’re not interested. Yes, there’s a restraining order.

A glimpsed headline suggests the main reason — “Slash cop goes free.” He was a police officer who cut somebody up. And that wasn’t the half of it. As former colleagues spit on him in public, as his father seems reluctant to embrace him and his own mother questions “whether you’ve changed,” as dirty detective Gary Cole (quite good) tasers him, makes threats that push him towards violence, we get the picture.

Joe Denton wasn’t just a violent, dirty cop. He was the most violent, the dirtiest. And now the district attorney (Michael Kinney) that he went after with a razor is snooping around, questioning the aged mobster (Shawn Lawrence) who used to pull Joe’s strings.

The dirty detective wants to just-served-six-years dirty cop to “DO something.” Otherwise, “You’ll be back inside so fast your bunk’ll still be warm!”

The DA’s daughter (Daniela Sandiford) lures him into an ambush. His only friend in town (co-screenwriter Macon Blair) is asking questions about an “accidental” death. And the mobster, on his death-bed, isn’t cooperating.

“You know, sometimes when I’m sleeping, I think I see what hell looks like… And it ain’t fire, and it ain’t devils. You know what it is? It’s just me.”

The trouble with Joe is, everybody knows how awful he is and sees right through him. He rehearses what he’s going to say to “make amends” to someone he’s wronged, “I am profoundly sorry,” and we know he’s not. He’s “working the (AA 12) steps,” he says. But he’s getting picked up in the local bar, doing shots at the strip joint.

The old mobster’s hospice nurse (Molly Parker) should see through him, too. We can see his manipulations — getting close to somebody who nurses a guy he needs dead, somebody with access to all sorts of drugs. But her? Sure, he looks like Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, but as we’ve established, he looks like an ex-con, and acts like one, too. What’s her angle?

That’s a big shortcoming in the ironically-titled “Small Crimes.” As the filth and corruption spread far and wide, as the walls close in on Joe, we don’t don’t empathize with his plight or believe anybody could fall for his various attempts at BS.

And there just aren’t enough surprises in the plot to make up for that. Too few people have “an angle.” Too many coincidences drive the story, especially the finale.

Too many moments that should play as darkly-funny just don’t.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drugs, nudity

Cast: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jacki Weaver, Gary Cole, Robert Forster and Molly Parker

Credits: Directed by E.L. Katz, script by Macon Blair and E.L. Katz, based on a novel by David Zeltserman. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:35

Imagine “Harold & Maude” as a Japanese musical, a morbid, deadpan dark comedy and social satire, a surreal snapshot of Japanese culture that’s also J-Pop band origin story.

That’s “We Are Little Zombies,” a daft, candy-colored Japanese confection that is the epitome of originality, the definition of post-ironic irony and the next best thing to an underage drinker’s tour of Nippon.

Not that there’s underage drinking. There’s no time, what with all the shoplifting, car-jacking, ridiculing Japanese funeral rituals and “screen” and “schoolgirl” fetishizing,  referencing Kafka, all of it underscored by Puccini and Beethoven and burping Japanese video game themes, it’s the trippiest movie you’ll see this year.

There’s a whopping 15 minute prologue, a false ending with fake closing credits, a story told with seizure-inducing montages, stop-motion animation and video game animation as it riffs on Japanese homelessness and Japanese chat shows. You’ll feel your passport got stamped even if, by some chance your mind isn’t blown.

They meet staring at a smokestack. It’s a crematorium, and this quartet of thirteen year-olds have two things in common. Each has just lost his or her parents. And none of them feel a thing.

Bespectacled longer Hikari (Keita Ninomiya) is our narrator, a child whose parents gave him every video game and game-platform under the Rising Sun. He’s availed himself on them ever since he was old enough to use his thumbs. His folks? They “died on a stupid stupid stupid” package bus tour, killed on their way to an “All You Can Eat” wild strawberry farm, “so they went straight to hell.”

Rotund Ishi (Satoshi Mizuno) grew up in the family stir-fry karaoke restaurant, coming home one night to a “bright orange sunset” hours after the sun had gone down. The careless restaurateurs accidentally torched it.

Abused kleptomaniac Takamura (Mondo Okumura), Mr. “The more I steal, the less I have,” lost his parents to suicide.

And Iluko (Sena Nakajima) was forced to become a nine-fingered pianist by her parents, who were murdered by her obsessed piano teacher. “I’m a femme fatale,” she deadpans, spelling and explaining the concept as we see her teacher “come on” to her and her father “propose” to her.

So yeah, “issues” abound.

They resolve to cut school and have “adventures,” start with a group grab-and-run in a convenience store, stumbling across a deliriously funny homeless jug band at the garbage dump. And that’s how “We are Little Zombies” become a band.

Writer-director Makoto Nagahisa’s debut feature is video-game-manic in execution, a tale told in short but numerous chapters identified as game “stages” (or levels).

The tunes are genuine Japanese ear worms.

And the social commentary is sweeping  and skewering. The “schoolgirl” obsession is such a cliche you can see it in many of the films of famed animator Hiyao Miyazaki, to say nothing of the costumes showcased in any red light district. The disaffected “screen addicted” generation is our four “little zombies.”  Nagahisa suggests how they turned out that way.

It’s so antic in pacing that when it finally loses steam in the middle of the third act, it’s almost a relief. There’s so much to take in, you almost miss Rinko Kikuchi, and two actors who starred in Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan “Mystery Train” over 30 years ago.

Not that this is about the adults. The kids are captivating charmers, even if they’re just playing “types.”

All these things — and more — considered, and I have to say “We Are Little Zombies” is the most entertaining thing to come out of Japan since sushi, “Iron Chef” and the Miata.

Maybe travel there is a dicey proposition this year, but watching “Zombies” makes for the kitschiest “package tour” of them all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Keita Ninomiya, Sena Nakajima, Mondo Okumura, Satoshi Mizuno

Credits: Written and directed by Makoto Nagahisa. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 2:00

This one streams Aug. 11. Of course I’m going to review it.

“Greyhound” is an old fashioned “Victory at Sea” style combat epic — narrow in focus, heroic in nature and relentlessly action-packed.

The escort destroyer skipper Tom Hanks plays gets no rest, on the bridge and on his feet for days on end as the U.S.S. Greyhound confronts a German wolf pack of subs, attacking his convoy day and night in the “black pit” — the point farthest from land, in the middle of a Feb. 1942 crossing.

This nail-biter of a thriller will make you feel like Capt. Ernest Krause — adrenaline rushes of alarm that will leave you exhausted by the end of this 90 minute summary of what this dangerous duty was like in those, the darkest days of the Battle of the Atlantic. Nazi submariners called it “Die Glückliche Zeit” — “the (second) happy time,” when the pickings were the easiest among Allied merchant ships and their escorts.

Capt. Krause is an older-than-he-should-be Navy officer who finally gets his first command after Pearl Harbor. He is the Navy version of Army Captain Miller, Hanks’ character in “Saving Private Ryan.” He’s by-the-book, reminding his young subordinates “This is what we trained for,” but probably conscious of the looks the others on the bridge exchange at every miscue, misstatement and gamble he makes in this fight.

The script — by Hanks (adapting a C.S. Forester novel) — is peppered with “explainers,” WWII Naval jargon which the captain or his crew illuminate the audience about, the tools of the U-Boat hunting trade  —“huff duff” and the like.

The strict chain of command on the bridge, with Krause dealing with an endless succession of messengers, relayed radio messages, intercom updates with his trusted “Ex O” (executive officer, played by Stephen Graham), give us the same sense of professionalism that Hanks brought to his “Private Ryan” captain, his tanker skipper in “Captain Phillips,” to Sully” the airline pilot, even the Fed Ex manager of “Cast Away.”

He REVELS in this stuff, sounding like an old salt for whom Naval jargon is second-nature, maintaining professional calm in the frenetic heat of battle because that’s what he’s been conditioned to do.

The film’s first “pip” (submarine radar surface contact) is chased down almost in real-time, a breathless sprint to keep a U-Boat from reaching the convoy. Before the days in this “no air cover” zone in mid-Atlantic are over, the “Greyound” (another nickname for destroyers) and its “flock” — merchant ships, tankers, converted ocean liner troop carriers and fellow escorts — will be attacked, time and again.

And in between attacks, erman taunting by radio. A sub skipper of the U-Boat “Grey Wolf” sneers “We hunt you. Zis wolf is HUNGRY. HOOOOooowwwwl.”

I kid you not. Did this sort of thing happen? Maybe. Then again, I’ve never read anywhere that Germans gave their U-Boats names.

That, and a somewhat pointless prologue — Krause was not just late in life getting a command, he can’t seem to convince Elisabeth Shue to marry him — are the rare missteps here.

“Greyhound” is made the way such films are created these days, with bridge interiors and deck shots of still-floating WWII vintage destroyers, and a lot of digital recreations of surface ships and U-Boats, hunting and being hunted — shooting and depth-charging, rising and plunging on the towering seas of the North Atlantic in winter.

Cinematographer turned director Aaron Schneider (“Get Low”) masks that with nearly non-stop action and a beautifully gloomy blue-grey color palette with splashes of orange flames and explosions. The film’s look is consciously reminiscent of a J.M.W. Turner painting — violent, dark and foreboding.

It’s the sort of movie Hollywood made plenty of examples of, from the early ’40s well into the ’60s. Hanks has skippered a picture that stands with the best of them, movies like “The Enemy Below,” an action-packed thriller with pathos, patriotism and military professionalism.

It might have been lost among the blockbusters of a normal movie-going summer. This year, it’s as good an excuse as any to sign up for Apple TV+.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for war-related action/violence and brief strong language

Cast: Tom Hanks, Stephen Graham, Rob Morgan, Karl Glusman and Elisabeth Shue.

Credits: Directed by Aaron Schneider, script by Tom Hanks, based on the novel by C.S. Forester. A Sony Film, an Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 1:32

A nerve-wracking Korean heist-gone-wrong thriller goes seriously wrong itself when “Time to Hunt (Sanyangeui sigan)” devolves into straight-up melodrama.

An ill-conceived armed-robbery, a naive “crew” that figures it’s gotten away clean when it hasn’t, and all the resources of the mob that ran the illegal gambling house they hit are ignored and a lone assassin goes on the “hunt.”

Worse still, he’s a predator who likes to play with his food. You know what that means. He toys with his prey, amps up their panic by taking his time, giving them a head start, even a chance to return fire, now and again. And you KNOW he’s going to talk, when silence is the scariest thing he could use on them.

It’s a shame, because the young actors and the characters they play, teaming up for a job they’re not quite up to, are a charismatic collection of gangland “types.” Their “plans” seem elaborate — because like most crooks, they’re not criminal masterminds.

Jun Seok (Lee Je-hoon) is fresh out of prison when he regales his old pals, the thoughtful Ki-Hoon (Choi Woo-sik) and the oafish Jang-ho (Ahn Jee-hong), that all they really need is that “one last score.”

Yeah, they say that in Korea, too (dubbed into English, or in Korean with English subtitles).

There’s this island off Taiwan where the sea is green and the living is easy. Steal some U.S. dollars, and they’ll be set for life.

The “job” Jun Seok comes up with isn’t rocket science, but stealing from a basement “gambling house?” Ill-advised. Desperate times in the Korea of the near future, with IMF protests and economic strife far and wide, inspire desperate crimes.

The benchmarks in such movies are covered — the planning (underdeveloped), arm-twisting an “inside man” (Park Jeong-min, who should be in a KPop band, with that hair), meeting an underworld gun dealer. The job itself goes off with a minimal fuss.

The mob they’re stealing from just misses grabbing them, and the leaders are furious. The guys?

“We’re safe! We did it!”

And then the dominoes start to fall and the hunter (Park Hae-soo) is on their scent.

Writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun has been directing movies for a decade, and he should certainly know that turning this tale into a solitary stalk has its advantages and serious shortcomings.

The “super-hunter” is charismatic, a cool costumer who sizes his quarry up and takes his time. But that stops the movie cold. A 90 minute thriller runs way over two hours when that happens.

The urgency goes right out the window, even though some of that is attributable to the criminals being utterly stunned at becoming the prey.

They’re young, did their time in the military and know a little something about guns. But when the pieces start to fall and the incriminating calls start to come in and the gang starts to shrink, they freeze-up. They should high-tail it, as stagecoach robbers used to put it. No. Let’s get caught in a hospital where the hunter Han can find us.

I was pretty forgiving of this right up to the finale, which is ridiculous, a sequence of scenes that don’t play by the rules the movie has set up. Characters are misplaced, people go down, get up, and are gunned down again. We wait for an absurd third act “intervention” because we know it’s coming. That’s what sloppy genre pictures stumble into.

“Time to Hunt” turns tiresome many minutes before it utterly wears out its welcome.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity, smoking

Cast: Lee Je-hoon, Ahn Jae-hong, Choi Woo-sik, Park Jeong-min, Park Hae-soo

Credits: Written and directed by Yoon Sung-hyun.  A Sidus/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:16

A couple of days late getting to this, but longtime Gannett Newspapers film critic Jack Garner died over the weekend.

I used to run into him at film festivals, Hollywood and New York new-release junkets, etc., a hard guy to miss (6’9″, a Falstaffian BEAR of a man) and a harder one to not like.

He had this great booming laugh that let you know, at a film preview or a movie premiere, that A) he was in the audience and B) the comedy was “working.” I distinctly remember him roaring through a New York preview of “In or Out” back in ’97. Practically drowned the rest of us out.

Like many newspaper film critics, he brought an editor’s mindset and skills to reviewing, shifting over from “the desk” to become one of the country’s most enduring and widely read film reviewers. And unlike a lot of us (cough cough), he had an easy charm and was widely liked among his peers.

Jack G. was 75.

“Relic” may be shrouded in gloom and fog, draped in the trappings of many a haunted house thriller. But its most revealing lines of dialogue can be appreciated by everyone, even those who don’t believe a house can be haunted.

A daughter, talking about her grandmother, reveals her understanding of life, aging and family responsibility to her mother in a universal truth.

“Isn’t that how it works? Your mum changes your nappies, then you change hers?”

This chilling Aussie horror tale is a parable on care for the aged wrapped in a curse that’s been literally built-into the family homestead.

Kay (Emily Mortimer) has been busy in Melbourne, too busy to keep close watch on her aged, widowed mother at her forest home out in the country. Now she and daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote, of “Dark Shadows” and “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”) have to go back there because neighbors haven’t been able to raise  “Gran” (Robyn Nevin, who was in “The Matrix” movies) on the phone or get her to come to the door.

Mother and daughter have to break into the house when they arrive. They search high and low. Every blanketed bed, every shawl-covered chair they YANK the cloth from, fully expecting to find her corpse.

Organized Kay files a missing person report, and the police arrange a search through the foggy pinewood forest. Sam, less settled in life and career, frets over the lack of visits, ways this tragedy could have been avoided.

And then Gran shows up; barefoot, remote, not really sure where she’s been but reluctant to give up much of what she thinks is going on.

There are thumps in the night behind the walls. She talks to someone in the shadows and walks in her sleep. She’s not…right.

Kay continues “organizing” and cleaning and checking on nursing homes. Sam makes that “nappies” remark I quoted earlier, wondering why Gran can’t move in with Mum, or why she shouldn’t move in with Gran herself.

But as she asks around about her grandmother’s new habits, she grows especially spooked by whatever’s making Gran chew on old photos, or bury them in the woods, and her increasingly violent mood swings.

Director and co-writer Natalie Erika James, making her feature film-directing debut, finds the frights in all the usual places — that thumping behind the wall that, when you thump it yourself to see what’s there, thumps back, creepy and possibly suicidal grandmother in the claw-foot tub, menacingly wielded knives.

But what resonated for me, and I suspect will for a lot of people, is the familiarity of it all. The post-it notes — “flush,” on the toilet, “turn off tap” stuck to the tub.

No one gets out of this world alive, we’re reminded. If you aren’t dealing with this in your family, you will be soon enough. “Relic” is awash in this grim side of late life, details that most screenplays go to some pains to dodge.

I’d call the film, whose titular “hook” is seriously “meh,” more a solid feature that does what it sets out to do than any sort of landmark in the genre.

But with death all around us and end-of-life decisions hitting millions around the world, all at once, the timeliness of “Relic’s” real-life horror, with a dab of supernatural violence tossed in, could not be more apt.

This is spooky on an effects and story-telling level, downright chilling on a personal one.

MPAA Rating: Rated R for some horror violence/disturbing images, and language

Cast: Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote

Credits: Directed by Natalie Erika James, script by Natalie Erika James and Christian White.  An IFC Midnight release.

Running time: 1:29

So if churches are getting payroll relief stimulus just like any other business, they should be subject to the same other times as any other business, right?

That’s the logic applied to this suit. Churches aren’t “special.” They are like concert halls and cinemas, businesses. Close one you have to close them all.

I’m not sure theaters in most places shouldn’t stay closed. But with all these pulpit-packed pandemic hot spots traced to the faithful, maybe this suit will shake a little common sense into political panderers letting religious cranks set policy.

Via The Hollywood Reporter

“AMC, Cinemark and Regal say that if churches are reopening, so must movie houses https://t.co/yVjqMC1H2Q https://twitter.com/THR/status/1280504587292639232?s=20