Movie Nation

About the nicest thing one can say about “Elvis from Outer Space” is that it’s no “Bubba Ho-Tep.”

I mean, if you’re gonna vamp “The King,” you need more than a title and a premise, that Fat Elvis was rescued by the CIA and turned over to aliens who took him to a planet in the Alpha Centauri system where he got young, entertained the rest of the universe a bit, and fretted over a love child he never acknowledged and felt the need to return to Earth, aka Las Vegas, to look her up.

You need a half-convincing Elvis. Throwing him (George Thomas) into an Elvis impersonator contest with even less convincing Elvi doesn’t help.

Having them all cover “new songs” because you couldn’t afford to buy the rights to any legit music from the Elvis catalogue is just another way to remind us you had no money to make this.

And we’ve already seen the second year animation school “aliens.” We already know that.

“I hate supercilious aliens from Alpha Centauri!”

A witless script, inept direction, joyless performances and puzzling “Why would anyone think making this was a good idea?” question hanging over it are all that holds “Elvis from Outer Space” back.

It’s not so bad it’s good, not bad-funny or bad-sad even. It’s just bad.

Cast: George Thomas, Diane Yang Kirk, Lauren-Elaine Powell, Alexander Butterfield and Martin Kove

Credits: Written and directed by Marv Z Silverman and Tracy Wuishpard. A Giant Pictures release.

Running time: 1:31

“The Outpost” is a straight-no-chaser account of a real-life battle during America’s Afghan War.

Cinematically, it’s “Zulu” or “The Green Berets,” with a heavy dose of the Afghan War documentary “Restrepo” for realism. It is chaotic, noisy and bloody, a movie dusted with “The Fog of War,” because this is how firefights really happen, and sometimes they blow up into full-fledged battles.

PRT (Provincial Reconstruction Team) Kamdesh was a base shoved into a mountain valley, surrounded by peaks and cliffs all around, so vulnerable the rotating Army units serving there nicknamed it “Camp Custer.”

We’re introduced to it through the eyes of new men assigned there, including stoic Staff Sgt. Romesha (Scott Eastwood) and hotheaded Sgt. Carter (Caleb Landry Jones), who was briefly in the Marines and isn’t shy about reminding the rest of their unit about that.

They’re here to win “hearts and minds,” get cooperation from and help protect the locals. But as events leading up to The Battle of Kamdesh demonstrate, this place is more about “blood and guts.”

Sniper fire and mortar fire directed from everything overlooking the camp makes it perilous. Taliban-sympathizing locals use visits to photograph and mark the camp’s vulnerable points. The “A of A,” Army of Afghanistan “trainees” among them are of suspect value and uncertain security risk.

The lead-up to the battle story is framed in chapters titled after commanding officers, “KEATING” being the first. He’s played by Orlando Bloom, and when Keating is ordered to get an MTVR, heavy-duty over-sized truck to a point 13 miles away, he takes the wheel for the dangerous mission, leading the convoy himself.

That leads to a new commanding officer, and so on down the line through the film. The “random” attacks grow in intensity, the base is slated for closure, that closure is delayed. And Sgt. Romesha takes a patrol out and basically lays out the way he would attack it, predicting the firefight to come, a rich tradition in combat films.

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The early acts of this two hour-plus drama are littered with shootouts and strained, exaggerated Army trash talk, “with our shield of ON it” “300” references, “SOMEbody’s gotta win this war” and the like. Carter rubs so many men the wrong way he gets into a shouting match in the MIDDLE of an attack.

“I will NOT argue and fight at the SAME time! SIR!”

Director Rod Lurie (the “Straw Dogs” remake) fills the screen with intertitles — helpfully identifying every soldier by name, annoyingly stating the obvious “Landing Zone” and “Command Post” and “Barracks.”

Once things blow up and hundreds of Taliban pour in, the tempo and urgency pick up.  The lay of the land, the horrors of fighting an enemy shooting and swarming in from all sides make the battle itself a maelstrom — white hot here, other men sheltered, getting pep talks, yelling into the radio and frantically trying to figure out how and where to respond — and Steadicam tracking shots put us into the fight, as confused as the men doing the shooting are.

A super-realistic touch — soldiers quaking at being ordered to or simply, by necessity, having to dash hither and yon for ammo, wounded comrades or to take up positions under a hailstorm of bullets and RPGs.

“The Outpost” is a movie without much of an agenda, aside from the military picking a stupid place for a base, maintaining it for (Afghan) political reasons and inadequately supporting it when all Hell broke loose.

It’s main fault is the slack time leading up to the battle, the bored soldiers playing “waterboarding” and exchanging advice “Don’t think of your wife” until you’re on your way home. There were 79 U.S. personnel there (and 42 Afghan allies, all but written out of the story) and at times, it seems like every one of them was cast as a speaking part.

So there’s clutter leading up to the “cluster-f–k” of a fight, and chaos afterwards.

“The Outpost” is still an engrossing and immersive look at an isolated battle in “America’s Longest War,” a representative bloody stalemate in a country where that’s the best most of those fighting there can hope for.

MPAA Rating: R for war violence and grisly images, pervasive language, and sexual references

Cast: Scott Eastwood, Caleb Landry Jones, Bobby Lockwood, Kwame Patterson and Orlando Bloom.

Credits: Directed by Rod Lurie, script by Eric Johnson and Paul Tamasy. A Millennium/Screen Media release.

Running time: 2:03

It’s often said “I’d rather watch an interesting failure by (name a famous filmmaker here) than passable entertainment from anybody else.”

That motto earns another workout — after misfires by Scorsese and Spike — with Atom Egoyan’s latest. “Guest of Honour” sees the Armenian-Canadian filmmaker touching on some favorite themes. Guilt, remorse and atonement turn up in many of his films, the good (“The Sweet Hereafter,” “The Captive,” “Remember,” “Ararat”) and the not good at all (“Exotica,” “Where the Truth Lies”).

A striking young woman (Laysla De Oliveira) comes to a priest (Luke Wilson), asking that her late father earn a funeral at the priest’s church. As neither her nor her father were Catholic churchgoers, the good father needs a chat to get details, a feel for the man he will eulogize.

What follows, after some wistful small talk about how Dad “took care of my pet rabbit,” is a veritable confession. She’s been in prison. She wanted to be there because she felt she deserved it. And perhaps it was a way of not just atoning for her own “sins,” but in getting back at her father.

That sets us up for a story told in three timelines. There’s the distant past, Veronica’s childhood, her parents’ seemingly happy marriage and Dad’s dreams of a string of restaurants, followed by her mother’s illness and death. Then there are the events leading up to Veronica’s imprisonment, with the third thread being the “present,” conversing with the understanding priest, revealing a LOT more than would ever come up in a brief “What to put in the eulogy” interview.

It’s a tried and true structure for a film, but a problematic one in this case. It’s the first seriously unsatisfying element in a movie that almost sets out to frustrate expectations.

But it’s still fascinating a myriad of ways only a seasoned filmmaker could manage.

Dad (David Thewlis, terrific as always) abandoned his restaurateur dreams and became a restaurant inspector — sympathetic but firm, a stickler for rules.

“Everything made in here goes out there,” he tells a protesting chef being cited for a dirty kitchen. “And THAT’S who I’m here to protect!”

Is he the paragon of ethics and compassion he seems to be? Veronica and her tale of woe are meant to make us question that.

She was “the hot young teacher” in a music school. There was in incident involving students, a damaged and obsessed bus driver (Rossif Sutherland, yes, another member of Donald Sutherland’s family), a “prank,” a suicide and…

Egoyan sets us up for a lot of possibilities here, shifting points of view as we follow the inspector trying to get to the “truth” of why she ends up in prison, the ethical lines he may cross there suggesting lines he might have crossed earlier.

The restaurant scenes (one featuring bunnies, to be served by Arsinée Khanjian, Egoyan’s actress/producer wife) are fascinating dissections of the compromises and excuses of chefs and restaurateurs and the easy-to-abuse absolute power of an inspector.

Thewlis knows how to play characters we can’t quite make up our minds about, and this guy has some experience interacting with people, questioning and leveraging his position to get answers about why Veronica is in jail.

The Brazilian De Oliveira gives Veronica the entitlement of the beautiful. She knows how men and boys react to her, doesn’t shrug off the driver’s “hot young teacher” label, and is practiced in the art of dismissing unwanted attention.

But the mystery of Veronica’s “guilt” that may actually be remorse, or even punishment, is left fuzzy. Her cruelty is what we see. The notion that she’s condemning of misreading her father just hangs there.

And the “closure” of “confession” to this priest isn’t anything of the sort.

Egoyan doesn’t wrestle these issues into shape, the framing device seems like the first idea for “telling” this story when a second, third or fourth should have been considered.

That makes “Guest of Honour” more unsatisfying than bad, more polished than it could be in many ways, but sloppy in ones that count — namely the script. It’s a textbook case of a “fascinating failure.”

MPAA rating: unrated, adult subject matter, profanity

Cast: David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Arsinée Khanjian, Rossif Sutherland  and Luke Wilson.

Credits: Written and directed by Atom Egoyan. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:43

I like the way this trailer plays to the #Blacklivesmatter moment.

Two Oscar winners — Jennifer Hudson, Forest Whitaker — with Marlon Wayans and this clever bit of casting, Marc Maron as the pushy/charming producer and genius-BEHIND-the-genius Jerry Wexler — are the highlights of this cast.

The director of the winning “Jessica Jones,” a couple of screenwriters not listed on the IMDb page (yet) and that cast give this December release some promise.

“You have to disturb the peace, when you can’t get no peace.”

(UPDATE: Roger Moore’s review of the “Crowdpleaser” “Respect” is here.)

Whatever the craftsmanship, the skill with which the story is told, a documentary is only as riveting as its subject — be it some odd business or hobby, or a character it’s built around.

And that holds true for mockumentaries, scripted films meant to look like a non-fiction piece of reality, as well.

The first hour of “Skyman,” a portrait of an Apple Valley, California man haunted by an alien “visit” as a child, convinced that “visitor” is returning on his 40th birthday, is overwhelmed by the banality of the ordinary, working class and seemingly deluded life whose story it tells.

A generally flat performance doesn’t help when we’re seeing and hearing interviews meant to flesh in how Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle) lives, how his life has turned out and how much this event when he was ten shaped his life.

A psychologist tries to explain the mental traits of someone claiming to have met or been abducted or even “probed” by aliens, vouch, someone who “may be just a little bit lost.” A friend and a former employer vouch for Carl’s character even if they note he’s always been a little off.

And the sister he lives with (Nicolette Sweeney) alternately defends him and indulges him.

But the film hangs on actual interviews with Carl, and a third act finale that finally gives away the artistry and suspense-building skill of “Blair Witch Project” co-director Dan Myrick, who delivers an ending that can’t up for the first 70 minutes.

Because what comes through in that long, tedious buildup — sitting down with Carl and his sister, following Carl to a UFO convention in McMinnville, Oregon (an annual May highlight of the McMinnville calendar), trailing Carl as he buys gear he needs and preps for his birthday “reunion” — is a sense of a documentary filmmaker who doesn’t know the best questions to ask, what to leave in, what to edit out, and how much patience the average viewer has with watching “filler.”

See Carl unplug to fridge in his hotel room because he’s “sensitive to electromagnetic current.” OK, we get it. Do we need the set-up of following him down the hall, ducking into his room, and everything that comes before that payoff?

See Carl clumsily question a published “visitor” expert on his book about arcane details of the weather, exact location, etc. of that man’s experience. The guy can’t recall every specific, perhaps making a point Carl threw out there to excuse alien encounter narratives, that “there’s truth in the inconsistencies.”

He’s obsessed. We also get that. And the colorful cosplay going on all around him at the festival (Darth Vader, in a kilt, on a unicycle playing “Scotland the Brave” on his bagpipes) isn’t distracting him.

There’s dead time in and around every introductory scene, and everything that doesn’t drive the “They’re coming back for me” narrative makes “Skyman” — 10 year-old Carl’s description of who he saw  — feel like it’s ambling through quicksand.

His sister (more animated, conflicted and revealing) confesses that “For the longest time, I thought it was a cry for help.”

The occasional moment of drama from her, the camera-caught side-eyes of his equally-indulgent pal (Faleolo Alailima) don’t make up for making us sit through outtakes which a “real” documentarian would have left on the cutting room floor.

“This gas station has the best beef jerky!”

Selle finally makes Carl interesting enough to watch in that finale. But every scene he underplays before that sucks the life right out of “Skyman.” Embittered encounters with locals he’s known all his life, a pointless visit to the Integratron and other sites shown in the “real” UFO doc “Calling all Earthlings,” about UFO cultist George Wellington Van Tassel, desert treks to bury this or set up that are all played in the same flat note.

Knowing that to be the case, you’d think the editing strategy would have been different. Knowing the subject matter and genre (UFO docs are almost as common as Holocaust recollections), you’re not going to “surprise” the viewer with “I was visited when I was 10 years old.” Why burn so much screen time establishing how “ordinary” Carl is, other than this signature, all-consuming event of his past?

There are desert shots, night-vision treks and a few images that stand out. And as I mentioned, the finale eventually delivers something of a payoff.

But as alien encounter documentaries or mockumentaries go, “Skyman” is boringly earthbound.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking, alcohol

Cast: Michael Selle, Nicolette Sweeney, Faleolo Alailima

Credits: Written and directed by Daniel Myrick. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:33

Yeah, we could all totally see her as this, right?

Jacki Weaver also stars.

It’s a common theme in fantasy fiction stories that deal with immortality, the idea that living forever isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But you don’t have to add the supernatural to learn that lesson. Just live long enough, bury a few friends, lovers and relatives. Bury a few more. And then more, still.

“Lola Igna,” the titular heroine of today’s “Around the World with Neflix (© pending)” offering, knows a little something about that. She’s 118 and might be — if the enterprise keeping track of such statistics will confirm it — not just “the oldest living grandmother in the Philippines, but the oldest living grandmother in the world!”

The film is a charming, almost serene Filipino tale that starts off in “Waking Ned Devine” territory and wanders into something almost profound, and certainly disquieting.

Because it’s all fun and games with a mayor, giddy at announcing the news, reassuring the reporters gathered for the press conference that “It’s not about money. It’s about the title!” When he adds (in, English, Spanish and Filipino) that yes, the company that compiles this stat pays out $50,000 per year of life as a prize, and that it’s, oh, $5.9 million US dollars is what that comes to, that sets up the movie’s expectations.

Lola Igna (Angie Ferro) is nonplussed. She gives a veggie diet, fresh air and “coconut wine” as the secrets to her long life. But asked if there’s anything left she’d like to do in her life, her answer rattles the grinning press corps.

“One event I am looking forward to is my death! I want to die, already!”

Peeing herself for emphasis, when her descendants won’t let her leave the stage when she’s ready to go, we get the idea that she’s serious.

But her family is tickled at the prize and the notoriety. Great granddaughter Nida (Maria Isabel Lopez) starts selling T-shirts and coffee mugs in the village shop. Great great grandson Bok (Royce Cabrera) starts leading tours of selfie-stick equipped visitors out to see the ancient woman.

And then the mysterious Tim (Yves Flores) shows up. He annoys Nida and the other shopkeepers, records video of himself doing this and that. And then he shows up at Lola Igna’s rice paddy hut and says he’s the son of her estranged great granddaughter.

But as he asks her permission to charge his phone, to vlog, to interview her and video record her life, we wonder.

Director and co-writer Eduardo W. Roy Jr. maintains that mystery for a while, but does more with the “ticking clock” of this story. An aged peasant woman, who talks to her decades-dead husband at every meal, who keeps a shrine to every loved one she’s long over her 118 years of life, is up for a big payoff. And all she really wants to do is to shake off this mortal coil.

The film’s style is meditative, with his heroine’s annoyance at the tourists, resignation to her fate, and just a whimsy about her, driving the narrative.

Tim, whatever his motives, falls under her spell. We do, too.

Roy has conjured up a corner of the world outsiders rarely see, a Philippines far removed from sexy cities and sophistication, and her immerses us in it.

And Ferro, a staple of Filipino TV and film for some fifty years, is documentary-real in the title role, warm but wary, wry but saddened by every loss her long life has let her see.

She wins our trust by making us laugh, and then uses that trust to break our hearts. It’s a terrific performance, a little piece of screen immortality brought on by playing someone who knows better than to wish that fate — immortality — on anyone.

(Eduardo Roy Jr’s “Ordinary People” is just as good, and on Netflix.)

MPAA Rating: Tv-14, profanity, alcohol, deaths

Cast: Angie Ferro, Yves Flores, Meryll Soriano, Maria Isabel Lopez and Royce Cabrera.

Credits: Directed by Eduardo W. Roy, Jr. script by Margarette Labrador and Eduardo W. Roy Jr.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

Old Rule — any movie or TV show in the horror genre that uses an electronic harpsichord in its score MUST be a comedy. “The Addams Family” and “The Munsters” forever made it so.

New Rule — All zombie movies should be Korean. None of this Atlanta-area zombie soap “Insomnia-inducing Dead” nonsense. Farce, horror thriller or rom-com, if it’s got “Living Dead,” leave that to the K-Pop K-horror experts.

When it opened in South Korea and parts of Asia, it played under the title “The Odd Family.” Here in the U.S., earning a virtual release July 1, it is “Zombie for Sale.” The only Western “improvement” to this laugh-out-loud-start-to-finish romp is a needed title change.

Sure, it’s a lowbrow genre picture with only the barest hints of “moral parable for our times” about it. But the debut feature of writer-director Lee Min-Jae is a hoot; cleverly conceived, amusingly-executed, comically satisfying.

A family running a failing service station in remote Poonsang has turned to grifting to stay afloat. The towtruck driving son (Jae-yeong Jung) leaves tacks on the road, motorists wreck and “I just happened to be passing by” leads to a tow, over-priced repairs (“Cash only!”) and lasting shame. If only the Park clan wasn’t so…shameless.

But elsewhere in Korea, an insulin replacement drug test has gone terribly wrong. The Parks don’t know this when they run into — literally — their first zombie.

The walking dead dude (Ga-ram Jung) hasn’t gotten the hang of things. He staggers between a couple of distracted, gossipy teens, moaning and lurching. Lunging for Park daughter Hae-gul (Soo-kyung Lee) just as city slicker sibling Min-gul (Nam-gil Kim) comes home is another #zombiefail.

That’s how he gets hit by tow-truck driver Joon-gul, who is pretty squeamish for a mercenary con-artist.

“I’m too much of a pussy to look” is funny in Korean, or in (English) subtitles.

The tone is set and the apocalypse is on its way. Except there are some new wrinkles here. The zombie bites their cranky, card-cheat dad (In-hwan Park) and the infection makes him young and virile. All his card-playing cronies want a bite.

“Line up. Cash only! Nothing’s free!”

Hae-gul develops a crush on this zombie, the one “pet” (she keeps rabbits) she doesn’t seem to be able to kill. She serves him cabbage, coating it with ketchup to simulate “BRAINS!”

Like America’s pandemic deniers, these yokels from the “stupid boonies” of Korea don’t “get” incubation periods and the like, even when their sophisticated city sibling tries to explain them. No good can come from this new “business model.”

The cast performs the leaps from deadpan and doltish to manic with aplomb. Movies like this invite you to pick a “favorite,” and mine is morose Nam-joo (Ji-won Uhm), the truck-driver’s VERY pregnant wife, who always keeps a frying pan in her hand.

Just. In. Case.

Director Lee doles out giggle-inducing slo-mo and easy-laugh sound effects (from “The Six Million Dollar Man,” for instance) as he serves up the action beats.

This is a “Zombie Aware” universe, where “Ever heard of the ‘Living Dead?’ They’re ZOMBIES” is all the explanation anybody needs for what’s happening.

Here’s something I have NEVER seen before in a screen treatment of characters using the Internet to save them. Min-gul, the “smart” one and guy who “was right all along,” does a web search for “Zombies, what they’re doing and what can be done.”

The web page gives him search results, BENEATH a pop up ad for ties. Yes, even in the Zombie Apocalypse, it’s comforting to know that the web is still tracking our search history and trying to sell us crap.

It isn’t long before a “Zombie Survival Guide” (book) is whipped out.

The energy flags in the middle acts, the logic and “rules” seem fluid (the movie breaks them, at will). But as “Zombie for Sale” manages a wickedly funny sprint to the finish, one thinks of “Train to Pusan” and its upcoming sequel and one remembers that one “new rule” that matters.

No pop culture gives “The Living Dead” their due like Korea.

MPAA Rating: unrated, gory violence, profanity

Cast: Jae-yeong Jeong, Soo-kyung Lee, Ga-ram Jung, Nam-gil Kim, Ji-won Uhm and In-Hwan Park

Credits: Written and directed by Lee Min-Jae. A CineZoo—Arrow Video (streaming in July) release.

Running time: 1:50

The recent release of “Mr. Jones,” a drama about the Welsh reporter who broke the story of the man-made famine Stalin imposed on Ukraine in the 1930s, is framed by journalist, critic and novelist George Orwell’s writing of “Animal Farm,” his scathing satire of Stalinism and totalitarianism.

Orwell, in the film, was an idealistic socialist-journalist who met Gareth Jones just as his story was about to break, and the aspiring novelist had his eyes opened by what he learned. Stumbling across the original, moving and generally faithful 1954 British animated version of “Animal Farm” on Tubi (one of several platforms where you can see it), I rewatched it to see what I could pick up from Orwell’s parable, watching it anew in a very different era from when it was created.

This animated classic was CIA-backed, pushed into production as the Cold War had moved from warm to hot. The Korean War, Soviet Russia stealing A-bomb secrets and exporting revolution all over what would come to be known as The Developing World, backing communist parties in war-ravaged Europe, you could see why the CIA would be interested in a little cinematic pushback.

The film’s messaging is blunt. But watching it now there are subtleties which perhaps the spy agency’s propaganda-purchasers didn’t have in mind when they got behind it.

The one screenwriter I can vouch for might be part of the explanation for that. I met American filmmaker Borden Mace as he was shooting a labor documentary, “The Uprising of 1934,” in the ’90s. That film was about wildcat textile strikes brutally put down across the South, scarring the region and setting back unions here for decades and decades. Mace made a lot of movies like that. He was an old-school post-Stalinist leftist filmmaker, or would go on to become one after his “story consulting” on “Animal Farm.”

What the film, like the novel, lays bare is the inherently corrupt, greedy and venal nature of humanity. “All animals are equal” morphs into “But some are more equal than others” as the cunning “pigs” among us seek more luxury, comfort, food and power, once they get control of government (Manor Farm).

The stand-ins for the monstrous Stalin (Napoleon, the pig), his cowardly but ruthless sidekick Beria (Squealer) are obvious. Snowball, the smartest pig, and most idealistic, but chased away and murdered, is Trotsky.

Watch “The Death of Stalin” if you need a refresher course on Stalin’s reign.

But giving a scheming pig Conservative Winston Churchill’s blustering voice (Maurice Denham) is no accident.

For all the point-blank shots at totalitarianism, Communism and dictators creating their own “elite” (the pigs) and Special Police (dogs, raised to be loyalists), there’s a healthy dose of Socialist Europe, and a post-National Health Service Britain endorsed by the preachings of the animated “Animal Farm.”

Idealism, socialism and “people’s rule,” aren’t mocked. Capitalism is disdained. “Embargoes” are shown for the exercises in cynicism that they are. There’s always a dirty dealer capitalist more than happy to trade with “the farm,” or launder Russian mob money in bogus real estate schemes.

Yeah, it resonates today. There’s Mr Whymper, our skulking backroom business hustler, a Deutsche Bank plutocrat putting Russian money and an American mobster/con-artist together, heedless of those who will be hurt or even killed “for profit.”

The “Our leader, wise as he is loved” accolades are straight out of Bolshevism, Nazi Germany, North Korea or wherever “cult of personality” rule is embraced by the “sheep” (literal, here).

The promise of happy life and “luxury for all” that Snowball preaches might be a legitimate promise, coming from him. But those who “have” are all too aware that they need to keep those who “don’t have” in their place, if they want to continue to “have.”

The animation isn’t Disney-smooth, but it is lovely in its own right, with a color palette that reeks of foreboding and character design that leaves no doubt who the villains are.

The CIA was good at that.

Using voice-over narration to tell the story and make its points is always a shortcoming, but seeing the alternative — TNT’s botched 1999 American TV version — underscores how right it was for this anti-commie fairy tale.

“Animal Farm” lives on, long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, because Russia is still closer to that state than a democracy, China may never abandon its “Some animals are more equal than others” ethos and North Korea remains enslaved.

And the world’s fresh outbreak of “strong men” and cult of personality leadership makes it even more topical. Ruthless cunning can still convince the sheep to believe lies that they’ve seen laid bare, with their own eyes, no matter what their nationality.

CIA-backed or not, Fall of the Soviet Union be damned, this more-subtle-than-you-think version of Orwell’s novel still resonates and remains relevant in an age of “Strong Men” rule.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: The voices of Gordon Heath and Maurice Denham.

Credits: Directed by Joy Batchelor, John Halas, script by Lothar Wolf, Borden Mace, Joseph Bryan III, Joy Batchelor and Philip Stapp, based on the George Orwell novel. An Associated British-Pathe, Louis De Rochment release.

Running time: 1:12

“Umrika” is a dark commentary on the varied reasons for immigration and its human cost wrapped in a sunny, traditional “coming to America” package. This Sundance Audience award winner is a fascinating film to get around to in post-Trump America, a time when that warm, well-worn “Anything is possible if we can just get to America” movie narrative has been utterly shattered, from within and from without.

Prashant Nair set his “illusions of immigration” parable in a very different India — the pre-boom 1980s. That India is evaporating. And within a couple of years of this film’s release, the America of “I lift my lamp beside the golden door” was closed, unmasked and utterly disgraced in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Rajan (Prateik Babbar) is the son of a picture-postcard village in the north of India, where chickens roost on the thatched roofs and goats wander the fields. He will leave the genteel poverty of this world and go to “Umrika,” as they say there — “America.”

His mother (Smita Tambe) is almost inconsolable. But she, her husband (Pramod Pathak) and younger son, Ramakant (Shubham More) are consoled by the promise that he’ll send money home, and that he’ll write.

And so he does. Within months, the letters begin to arrive as our narrator, the adult Ramakant (Suraj Sharma) tells us. Rajan sends magazine photos of the sights, and regales them all with the wonders in the U.S.

“Over here, even the bathrooms are bigger than Lalu’s hut!”

The postman, played by Rajahs Tailang, reads the letters aloud to the entire, mostly-illiterate village. Presents — a “piggy bank” — arrive, as well. And this goes on for years. Ramakant is inspired to go to school with his pal Lalu, and learn to read.

Electricity comes to Jitvapur, a family member dies, and then the letters stop. Ramakant learns the truth behind the letters, but not the whole truth. He must go, first to Dehli, and then to Umrika, to figure out what has happened.

And in the teeming, corrupt city, the young man, accompanied by his childhood pal Lalu (Tony Revolori of “The Grand Budapest Hotel”), doggedly follows Rajan’s trail, which points to all sorts of unhappy or unsavory conclusions as to what happened to him.

“Umrika” is a dramedy of intrigues, moral compromises and suspense interrupted by lovely dashes of whimsy, the gossip, legends and delusions 1980s working class/working poor Indians harbored about the mythic land across the sea.

“I’ve heard in Umrika, there’s this thing called ‘calories,'” one wag declares (in Hindi with English subtitles). “Makes them all big as balloons.”

The family back home sees pictures of a cookout Rajan allegedly went to, and just KNOW those hot dogs everybody is eating could not mean he’s eating MEAT. They must be roasted “American carrots!”

And when the traveling tent cinema shows “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” notions of who the actual “hero” of the picture is are entirely different, as the audience shouting at the screen and pelting Harrison Ford’s image with food reveals.

But those lighter touches are but distractions from the larger drama of Rama’s scheming to get to the man who helped smuggle his brother abroad, to get information from another guy from their village who lives in the city and may know something, and of Rama’s disillusionment about his brother, their family, their village, their country and the one Rajan wanted to go to — Umrika.

It’s a film of genuine surprises and tiny delights, even though it bogs down and loses its urgency when the quest that drives it falls into the background. There are hints of “Il Postino” and “The Third Man” in its mashup of plots.

The performances are generally solid, if a little generic. Revolori stands out and makes the sharpest impression.

But Nair — he went on to make “Tryst with Destiny” after this — has conjured up a warm, yet illusory and brittle memory of a more naive time, when Indians and Americans could live perfectly happy, seeing only the innocent gloss of their current lives and the glorious, gilded world that awaited them, if only they could make it to Umrika.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Suraj Sharma, Smita Tambe, Tony Revolori, Prateik Babbar and Rajesh Tailang

Credits: Written and directed by Prashant Nair. A Samosa Stories/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:38