Movie Nation

Ask a hundred film buffs what their favorite cult film is, and you’ll get 500 answers.

Because nobody wants to limit that pick to the obvious — “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” “Harold & Maude,” “Eraserhead” — to admit how many times they’ve watched “The Evil Dead,” or to interrupt their latest trip to Lebowski Fest to give the question more serious thought.

So it’s no wonder that Quiver and director Danny Wolf couldn’t limit themselves to a single documentary, rounding up stars, directors, academics and critics to swoon over and deconstruct their favorites.

“Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time” is a three-part mini-series, covering everything from “Freaks” to “The Warriors,” “Spinal Tap” to “Valley Girl.”

There are lots of opinions about the definition of a “cult” film, taking into account its “edge,” forbidden fruit “danger,” rejection by the mass movie audience (many were bonafide “flops” that found their audience over decades) and that ineffable “something” that makes you want to call your best friend and yell, “Friend, you have GOT to see this.”

I think John Cleese comes the closest to getting that definition right.

A cult film, Our Lord J.C. (of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) says, is one “that you think is much better than it is.”

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)” is celebrated as the greatest cult film of them all, a movie that opened to little notice, but which “never ever left the cinema,” as Patricia Quinn, one of several members of the cast speaking here, declares. Fans and critics and cult director John Waters (“Pink Flamingos”) talk of its impact on the culture, putting a “transvestite transexual” on screens where isolated, closeted fans could see someone that might be closer to their own sexuality than anything mainstream Hollywood was putting out.

Tod Browning’s still alarming “differently-abled” thriller “Freaks” (1932) is titled “the scariest movie ever made” by the likes of comic writer Bruce Vilanch and others.

Pam Grier talks of her glory days in Blaxploitation cinema like “Foxy Brown” and “Coffy.”

Gary Busey goes hyperbolic over “Point Break,” which has gained stature via a growing online fandom.

“Harold & Maude,” “The Decline of Western Civilization” punk documentaries, the films of the cleavage-cultist Russ Meyers and the down and dirty noir classics of Sam Fuller (“The Naked Kiss”), John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13” — a lot of ground is covered just in “Volume One: Midnight Madness.”

Everybody here is an enthusiast, and director Danny Wolf got Jeff Bridges and John Turturro to talk about “The Big Lebowski,” Rob Reiner and several others to speak about “Spinal Tap” and David Patrick Kelly to reminisce of the glory that was and remains “The Warriors.”

Those big names missing (Tim Curry, Keanu, Kathryn Bigelow, Tarantino, David Lynch, seen only in a ’70s interview) are barely missed.

Not all of it works. The conceit of having a “panel” consisting of directors Joe Dante (“Gremlins”) and John Waters, actress Ileana Douglas (?) and comic and actor Kevin Pollack (!?) could have left the hosting to Waters — the real authority, the Cult King.

There’s a whole subgenre of “revolting cult films” that aren’t so labeled but show up here. “Eraserhead” and any of the early warped Waters movies could turn your stomach.

Later installments will dwell on everything from masterpieces like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Blade Runner” to the obscure “Liquid Sky,” bonafide hits (no “cult” to them) like “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” to the zombie genre — “Living Dead” movies no longer having any cult appeal.

What, no “Stunt Man?” Well, they got to “Show Girls.” That’ll have to do.

But that’s the fun of it all, the arguments it starts. Because what really defines this sub-category of cinema is movies that have taken on a life of their own, taken over by fans.

And if the fans prefer “The Warriors” (popular, enduring, classic) to “Streets of Fire” (a lot more “cultish” for my money), they’re the arbiters.

“Time Warp,” in three installments, shows up via VOD and digital streaming, April 21 (ep. 1), May 19 (ep. 2) and June 23 (ep. 3).

Tune in. All the cool kids will be there.

Here’s where you can Stream “Time Warp: The Greatest Cult Films of All Time”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity, grotesque imagery, profanity

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Pam Grier, John Waters, Penelope Spheeris, Amy Heckerling, Gary Busey, Jeff Goldblum, John Turtorro, Joe Dante, Ileana Douglas, Sid Haig and David Patrick Kelly.

Credits: Directed by Danny Wolf. A Quiver release.

Running time: Three episodes at 1:30 each.

Molly Sims is the right Missy.

Lauren Lupkus is “The Wrong Missy.”

David Spade is back?

Thanks, Netflix.

May 13.

Too many movies to name begin with a famous quotation as an opening title, a prologue that parks the objectives of the story within the parameters of a pithy observation about life, love or the world we live in. We forget them before the frame has wholly faded into the first scene.

But here’s one you need to remember, first scene to last. The French dramedy “Bad Seeds (Mauvaises herbes)” is introduced with a famous phrase from Victor “Les Miersables” Hugo — “There are no bad seeds or bad men; there are only bad farmers.”

“Bad Seeds” is loaded with laughs, but a Middle Eastern massacre plays out under its opening credits. A little boy is the sole survivor.

The first of many jarring shifts in tone jumps us from this tiny waif’s plight, weeping and lost and alone, to present day Paris and the parking lot of a mall. An old woman has her purse snatched. An elderly passerby gives chase.

But the moment thief and pursuer are out of sight, the legendary Catherine Deneuve, as Monique, proceeds to empty the chivalrous stranger’s cart into her car trunk.

The abandoned purse always has a note in it, in French — “That will teach you to help others, a—–e!”

The young mugger (the French comic and writer-director-star Kheiron) and “old lady” are in cahoots. They share the haul and share an apartment.

She’s all “I’m not old, I’m EXPERIENCED (in French, with English subtitles).” He’s forever pulling scams — getting phone numbers of beautiful women who think he’s at the airport (he’s in a suit) to pick up Beyoncé and/or Jay-Z. Oddly, he never has the nerve to call.

But one mall carpark hustle too many puts them in the sights of her old friend, Victor (screen veteran André Dussollier of “Amelie” and “A Very Long Engagement”). He recognizes her, and chases down him. Damned if the tables aren’t turned.

Monique shrugs it off, but Waël has a rap sheet. And Victor’s turning the tables has a kicker. I’d hate to turn you in. Help me run this class for troubled kids — just for a day.

Monique can be his “volunteer” secretary, as he interviews to fill a permanent teaching position. Waël will handle the kids.

Mon dieu! Is he qualified?

“No,” she chuckles. “But he’s full of surprises.”

So the “retired” woman who describes her job as “to keep (Waël) out of jail,” will work the office — scaring off potential qualified competitors there for a job interview. Waël, who is none the wiser, has to engage and entertain “problem children” kicked out of the schools in Creteil well enough to keep them coming back.

Kheiron, whose real name is Manouchehr Tabib, leans on his stand-up background to try and get the half-dozen miscreants, who give him the silent treatment “in protest” of their punishment, to speak to him and to get something out of this “class.”

He riffs. You, Karim! Are you gay?

“NO!”

“Change your SHIRT, then!”

To Ludo, the one African in the class, “Remember to brush your teeth. Back in the day, slaves with the best teeth had the most value. And you never know…”

He insults them, regales them with tall tales, and takes them out into the nearby streets to make connections, beg, hustle and “communicate.”

Two kids are in rival gangs, one’s hiding a painful secret, the youngest is a Gypsy (Roma) who never stayed in one place long enough to learn to speak French, much less to write it.

Victor — who coincidentally shares the first name of Monsieur Victor Hugo — has just one bit of advice for dealing with this cross-section of modern France. “Remember, a problem child is a child with a problem.”

The little life lessons/hustles are cute, Deneuve’s Monique has plenty of hustles up her own sleeve, and so much of the movie’s “present day” is light that it plays like a teacher-changes-students/students-change-teacher comedy that isn’t quite all there.

And then WHAM, a flashback takes us back to Beirut (never overtly identified) and the horrors this little boy endured many years ago. He finds sunglasses, and learns to be a “blind” beggar/pickpocket. He witnesses crimes and death, suffers loss and want and fear.

Waël, too, picks up on the “child with a problem” cases in his class, when he isn’t hitting on the voluptuous older sister of one student and wondering what this shifty-looking “social worker” is doing lurking around another.

Kheiron has a deft hand with comedy, and like many a comic who writes her or himself into a film, a passion for pathos. Deneuve could play her light, sweet and not-above-deceit character in her sleep, and doesn’t. She’s delightful, and the fact that the script doesn’t over-explain her or her connection to Waël adds to the “old lady” cool she wears with her usual style.

And Dussollier gets two of the biggest, simplest laughs you can imagine, and does so with a very French elan.

But the turns toward the touching in the third act makes “Bad Seeds” more than a comedy that almost works. They are lump in the throat moments that pay homage to Victor Hugo, to “bad seeds” given the right farmer, to the art of the con artist’s “long con,”and to that one teacher/mentor/surrogate parent who makes a difference in just one life, and lives to see its ripple effects.

Watch it in French, enjoy the laughs, stay to the end, keep your Kleenex box handy and expect to be moved.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Kheiron, Catherine Deneuve, André Dussollier, Ouassima Zrouki, Youssouf Wague Louison Blivet, Hakou Benosmane, Adil Dehbi, Joseph Jovanovic, Leila Boumedjane

Credits: Written and directed by Kheiron. A Studio Canal/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

Early ’90s, a self-sustaining human habitat experiment in a biosphere.

It was so fascinating that it even inspired a Pauly Shore movie.

Remember Pauly Shore?

May 8, this Neon documentary remembers this event in the words of the people who lived through it.

Eva and Brandon are that couple that you’re rooting for in high school or hoping that they make it through college together.

And so is the movie about their romance. “Angelfish” covers very familiar cinematic ground. He’s from the wrong side of the New York tracks, she’s from an equally wrong side. She has responsibilities, duties to her family. He does, too, with an even worse home situation to manage.

But these two crazy kids and their comfort food romance — “West Side Story” without the dancing or singing gangs — have something. They may not say much or do much. But they pass the test Brandon’s boss at the supermarket deli (Bobby Plasencia) sets up in the first scene.

“It ain’t all sunshine and roses. You’ve gotta find someone who’s not gonna put you in a bad place.”

Brandon, played by Jim Stanton of Showtime’s “Your Honor” series, keeps to himself, keeps it polite and when he has to, keeps it real. He’s from Kings Bridge, a section of the north Bronx that’s long been tough and is transitioning from working class white to Latin in the early ’90s.

He meets Marble Hill native Eva (rapper Princess Nokia) at the meat counter, and bluntly helps her fend off a creeper running his “Aye, mami” game at her against her will.

She’s pretty and shy, college-bound. That’s all he gets from her. But as she walks away his slack-jawed smile gives away his game. Smitten.

Eva’s friends, especially the brash gay teen Ricky (Sebastian Chacon), have little pearls of wisdom for her, too. Close the deal with your beau Rafael, who’s down in “PR.” Go to college. Get on with it.

“It don’t make sense waiting to do something that’s going to make you happy,” Ricky advises, reading from the movie gay BFF guidebook.

But is Rafael and college to study accounting what she wants to do? It’s certainly her working mom’s wish.

The second moment Eva runs into Brandon is where her questioning of that path begins. He’s big on telling her to follow her dream and try acting. She doesn’t say anything, but maybe a deli man at a market isn’t all he could be, either.

Life at home? Complicated. She’s got siblings, including an older brother with special needs, and mom works all the time. He has a younger brother, Conor (Stanley Simons), a lazy teen itching to hang out with the wrong crowd.

And their single mom (Erin Davie) is a barfly, still pretty enough to wind up bringing this guy or that guy home. She doesn’t feed her kids and brushes everything off on Brandon. Oh, and she’s always mouthing off about “those people” coming in “our neighborhood.”

Well, as the Bard said, “The course of true love never did run smooth. True love always encounters difficulties.”

Mentioning Shakespeare in reviewing writer-director Peter Lee’s debut feature isn’t fair, but he’s riding on the shoulders of giants, dwarves, and everybody else who ever scripted a “young love” romance here.

He shortchanges Eva’s posse of friends, and conveniently leaves Brandon a loner — trapped keeping his kid brother out of trouble, holding his tongue longer than humanly possible over his mother’s pronounced neglect and disinterest.

The movie is both uncluttered and malnourished by that narrowing of focus.

Lee’s leads aren’t dazzling, but both have good chemistry and screen presence. Stanton has more scenes, but all he has to do is live up to the line Eva’s girlfriend slips her when they do their restroom “conference” about her new beau.

“You should see the way he looks at you!”

Princess Nokia, who may return to using her “Not a cell phone” name (Destiny Nicole Frasqueri) someday, doesn’t have a lot of arrows in her acting quiver yet. But she feels real up on the screen. Her character is lived-in, conflicted, not ready for the adult decisions she’s having to make at 18.

“Angelfish” is seriously undemanding, but benefits from novel settings (few New York movies are set in Marble Hill/Kings Bridge) and a period piece story that strips away the artifice and distraction that love in the age of cell phones promises. Back in ’93, you had to use a pay phone when you wanted privacy, had to write somebody’s number down and had to wait in the apartment if you were expecting a call.

That’s true love.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity, suggestions of sexual situations

Cast: Princess Nokia, Jim Stanton, Stanley Simons, Erin Davie, Sebastian Chacon and Rosie Berrido

Credits:  Written and directed by Peter Lee. A Dark Star release.

Running time: 1:36

For a fan, there’s nothing more delightful than stumbling across an action title — or a comedy, a romance, whatever — that you’ve missed starring the French monument to modern cinema, Jean Reno.

Because how many times can I re-watch “Ronin,” “The Professional,” “Cold Blood” or that serene, obscure jewel, “The Big Blue?”

He’s the French Chow Yun Fat, Denzel or Costner — laconic, steely, vulpine. And the fact that he can play comedy with skill, too, makes him a very rare bird indeed.

A vulture, judging from those eyes, that profile.

“22 Bullets” came out in France and Europe in 2010, made it to video in North America in 2013, and is a sturdy enough vengeance thriller — a straight-up genre piece with a lot of blood, a few passable shootouts, a half-decent chase, a few whiz-bang editing exercises jazzing up simple dialogue scenes, and one great speech.

Reading the credits, it’s no surprise that “dialogue” required extra hands. This bad guy making his mortal promise to the gang that tried to kill him (22 bullets worth) is a doozie, and I’m just going to quote it and let you imagine Reno biting off every word (in French, with English subtitles). He’s gotten the drop on the would-be assassins, whom he rightly accuses of breaking the rules, attempting “murder,” not “assassination.”

“Charly Mattei, and I’m here to kill you. Out in the open. It’s a matter of respect. I want you to know who kills you. Why you die.

“You don’t kill in a hood. That’s murder. You…you don’t sign the message!”

“I’m going to kill all of you, one after the other. But not right now. I want you to think about what you did, think about it day and night. Beg your wife and children for forgiveness, tell them why you’re gonna die.”

“And when you least expect it — tomorrow, in six months or a year, I’ll be there.”

“You’ll never be safe as long as I’m alive.”

Now that there is a threat, a blood oath to chill the marrow of the most hardened villain.

MPAA Rating: unrated, absurdly violent, drugs, sexual situation, smoking and profanity

Cast: Jean Reno, Marina Fois, Kad Merad and Richard Berry.

Credits: Directed by Richard Berry, based on the novel by Franz-OlivierGiesbert, script by Richard Berry, Matthieu Delaporte, Alexandre de La Patellière and Eric Assous.  A Cinedigm/Roku release.

Running time: 1:57

All right, settle down, settle down.

Don’t get your Tommy Johns (women’s, or men’s edition) in a titillated twist.

The come-on for “Clementine,” which could be “licentious young lesbians libidinously lead us on,” is just that, the old bait-and-switch. It’s a little more high-minded than softcore, even if it has the plot and payoff of nothing more than a turgid tease.

We meet Karen (Otmara Marrero) as she awakens to sweet nothings being whispered in her ear.

“You’re so young,” off-camera lover purrs. “You’re gonna break my heart!”

What do we call that, kids? PROJECTION. The unseen artist “D” summarily dumps poor, pretty young Karen, changes the locks and keeps their shared Lab beyond her reach.

Damn her, anyway. That’s what Karen figures. But she takes a lying “I’m at the lake house” voice mail seriously. Showing up with no one there, Karen breaks in and proceeds to do a little revenge house-sitting.

Nothing that destructive. But she’s going to use this place, kick back, snoop around (plenty of evidence of Ms. D’s prior and probably current conquests). Maybe have a row in the boat, sunbathe on the dock.

But there’s this damned teenager already parked there. “Lana” (Sydney Sweeney of TV’s “Sharp Objects” and “The Handmaid’s Tale”) says she’s 19 and doesn’t look it.

She says she has a dog, but Karen doesn’t believe it. And yet she drives Lana around, in the dark, while they look for “Bingo.”

BTW, “no one actually names their dog ‘Bingo,'” she grumps.

But there is a dog, and there’s something about this pushy teen, something in her “Why would I lie about that?” comebacks, her “I’m gonna be an ACTRESS” aspirations, piques Karen’s interest.

The much younger woman is seeing how it feels to be the “older” woman. We don’t see it, but we can guess that maybe she’s wincing in recognition of her own MO thrown back in her gorgeous face — young, beautiful and I know it, using my powers of attraction over an older woman.

Besides, Karen — who can’t be over 24 or so — likes being the sage. Who doesn’t?

“It’s funny how things matter so much when you’re young…You’re only old when you know what you want. And then you can’t get it.”

She even explains D’s paintings, which hang all over the house, in a dismissive way D herself must have used on her once.

“It’s more about the process than the result.”

How many quasi-talented hustlers with a brush used that one?

There’s sharing and flirtation, and then a handyman (Will Brittain of “Kong: Skull Island”) shows up, test the older woman’s patience and the younger one’s commitment to possibly experimenting with same sex sex.

Writer-director Lara Gallagher can be praised for avoiding the “gay porn cliches” this story could have devolved into. But she shoots for a thriller tone with this, and beat that notion into Katy Jarzebowsk, who did the “tenterhooks” thriller score.

Right.

The players are more poker-faced than alluring and mysterious. Backing away from the titillation at that late stage seems a cheat. Maybe Karen’s older and wiser, but brazen Lana seems a bit of a bust as a vamp.

There are mysteries, dramatic confrontations, and there’s even that old cliche, Chekhov’s “pistol” present in the first act which the rules say, must play a role in the third act.

If you read enough into “Clementine,” you can almost talk yourself into thinking there’s more to it than there is. But if Oscilloscope Labs has it, they must have seen the same undercurrents I did.

And they knew there are tougher things in movie distribution than talking people into seeing a “thriller” with two lithe young lesbians at its heart.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual subject matter, alcohol and marijuana use.

Cast: Otmara Marrero, Sydney Sweeney, Will Brittain, Sonya Walger

Credits: Written and directed by Lara Gallagher. An Oscilloscope Labs release.

Running time: 1:30

Watching the Spanish thriller “The Legacy of the Bones” is a bit like having a conversation with an elderly relative.

Endless exhausting digressions, a phone book full of characters with speaking parts, scenes that merely underline what’s already been established all of which end with a shout of “Stay FOCUSED. Get back to the POINT.”

And of course that “point” is obvious as the opening scenes can make it.

A prologue establishes a persecuted minority in the North of Spain — the Cagot. If the Basque have a discriminated-against beef with Castilian domination, the Cagot have a legitimate grievance with blood all over it.

And to the historical record of discrimination (think “Gypsies,” outcasts, denied the right to live in town, etc.), this film — based on a Dolores Redondo novel — adds “persecuted for witchcraft.”

We see witch accusations and witch burnings in the early 17th century.

Cut to the present day, when churches are being desecrated wit human arm bones, murderers are dismembering (always an arm) their victims, and then killing themselves before they can be prosecuted.

“Tartalo,” they scribble on notes intended for the detective, Amaia Salazar (Marta Etura of “The Impossible” and “The Man with a Thousand Faces”).

“Tartalo.”

Someone, some group of some thing is hellbent on settling old scores with the Holy Church, the government and this detective, who grew up in this Pamplona-to-San Sebastian region, and is invoking the name of a cyclops of Basque mythology.

Metaphor much?

Det. Salazar is A) pregnant and B) has an old family name which ties her to the place and to the distant past. She has a mother in the hospital and a no-visible-means-of-support husband (Benn Northover) who becomes the primary caregiver after she has her baby.

Then there’s the aged Auntie (Itziar Aizpuru) who reads Tarot cards and has a bad feeling about this.

Yes, those are tidbits of FOREshadowing. You don’t introduce a baby and a possible madwoman into the mix if you’re not baking a Hansel & Gretel cake.

Salazar is lectured by her superiors to not “make too much fuss (in Spanish, with English subtitles — or dubbed into English) about this” because they “don’t want” these church desecrations, buried bodies, missing bones and references to an ugly past to “make the papers.”

Meanwhile, people keep getting cut up, or cut themselves up, leaving notes or messages to Salazar as they do.

“Tell her I’m glad she’s back! TARTALO!”

“Legacy,” titled “Legado en los huesos” in Spanish, is a frenetically languid movie. All these locations — murder scenes, churches, offices, prisons, hospitals, morgues, relatives’ homes, a near-Biblical flood — to dash to, lots and lots and LOTS of supporting characters who hissing “Tranquilo” (calm down, take it easy,,BE QUIET) to Salazar.

But she’s getting progressively and UNDERSTANDABLY more freaked out. Nightmares, allusions to her family’s history, DNA wrinkles, a hint of the supernatural and/or a death/dismembering cult, a newborn baby that her nagging do-nothing husband insists she stop, come home and nurse.

You know somebody or something’s gonna want that baby. You don’t have to read a single subtitle to “get” that.

Whatever he felt he owes the novel, director Fernando González Molina owed the viewers a heartless trimming of the script and thinning of the cast.

Movies like this invite me, and you, to do a rough cut re-edit in our heads. We know where it’s going, if not every single digression it’s going to take. Padding the picture with traveling scenes, conversations that don’t advance the plot, all this DOMESTIC stuff (sex scene included) — just means they’ve got around 75 minutes of a chasing witchcraft movie trapped in 121 minutes of Netflix streaming time.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, sex

Cast: Marta Etura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Carlos Librado, Imanol Arias, Francesc Orella, Itziar Aizpuru and Benn Northover

Credits: Directed by Fernando González Molina, script by  Luiso Berdejo, based on the Dolores Redondo novel.  A Netflix Original.

Running time: 2:01

There’s little doubt who and what inspired Ryan Murphy’s new series “Hollywood” on Netflix. It was the scandalous book and doc and claims of “Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood.”

The series is about what Murphy, of “Glee” and “Feud” and “American Horror Story” did with that. He looks for an alternate “Hollywood ending” to all the slow-to-change gender and racial discrimination that might have been different had Scotty and other closeted, “use the back entrance” and the like acceptance of the status quo people in and around show business had been upended by what was REALLY going on in Tinseltown during its Golden Age.

Interesting premise. Solid cast.

Looks promising. May 1 on Netflix.

The human migrant experience has a universality that spans continents and cultures, that connects the poor Guatemalan fleeing violence and the Indian hoping to escape to opportunity.

Desperation, exploitation, the pull of assimilation battling the comfort and “safety” of hanging with your “own kind,” speaking your native language — you can find this is Little Haiti or Chinatown, barrios, meat processing plants or any restaurant you could name.

Even in Japan.

“Complicity,” the subtle, tense, touching and somewhat slow debut feature of writer-director Kei Chikaura looks at this story through the eyes of a young Chinese immigrant as imagined by a Japanese filmmaker.

It’s about cultures clashing, the desire for assimilation and “succeeding” in a new country that is straining against the pull of the past, the legal and moral barriers, stresses and pitfalls faced when someone this young and poor uproots his life to try and make it somewhere new.

Parking a Chinese illegal immigrant in one of the most infamously insular and racist cultures on Earth is a situation rife with strife, at least around the story’s edges. But Chikaura makes the main focus the heart-breaking and soul-crushing pressures facing Chen Liang (Yulai Lü), who left his ailing mother in the care of his grandmother and slipped into Japan to learn a new trade, “make a lot of money” and send for them back in Henan province.

The moment we meet him, we know how wrong this dream has gone. He’s caught up in a theft ring, stealing water heaters and the like from homes and businesses.

The cost of smuggling means he’s trapped, exploited by the very community one would expect to give him shelter and help. Watch “The Search for General Tso” or “Ghosts” documentaries to see how this can play out.

Chen Liang sees his trap, and in one last desperate act, he buys fake identification (and a new phone) to escape it. He will strike out on his own, scrape together a new life, escape his recent past and unsavory associations while still lying to his mother in their weekly chats about how well he is doing.

As Liu Pei, with a made-up past (he’s now from Beijing) and resume, he takes a job in a tiny noodle restaurant in suburban Ōishida. The gruff owner, Hiroshi (Tatsuya Fuji, a star since 1976’s “In the Realm of the Senses”) becomes a father figure to him as he introduces Liu to the world of soba noodles. His daughter (Kio Matsumoto) is the very picture of accommodating kindness.

And there’s this cute artist (Sayo Akasaka) his age whom he delivers noodle dishes to. She takes a shine to him — or rather the invented version of Liu.

But every time Liu Pei starts to immerse himself in mastering this corner of Japanese cuisine, every time he figures a “normal” life is within reach, his old life an old gang reach out for him.

Why can’t he join in on this “job?” I lost my flat, why can’t I stay with you? Why can’t we all smoke in this restaurant?

Chikaura has Liu Pei see the boorish and even criminal behavior of his “gang” through Japanese eyes. Every Japanese person he meets — even police– is unfailingly polite.

A key scene — Liu Pei screws up a delivery, having trouble finding his way (by delivery bicycle) in Ōishida. He must apologize to his mentor, the daughter insists. That becomes painful for everyone involved.

Liu Pei’s back-story, delivered in flashbacks, shows us just what he was fleeing in China — unpleasant life responsibilities, a slim chance of success and “freedom” to live his own life. Not exactly slave labor or civil war.

Chikaura passes along little judgments of Liu Pei and Chinese immigrants in general like this.

The director passes up the chance to take a more conventional route, immersing us in the painstaking and oh-so-Japanese way of making buckwheat noodles and the dishes they’re used with, to focus on all the strings tugging poor Chen Liang/Liu Pei in different directions, ensnared in this new name, new lie and illegal life he’s living.

Yulai Lü gives the character a poker-faced stoicism that fits his unwillingness to show weakness and emotion to his Japanese hosts.

Surprising turns here and there don’t wholly lift “Complicity” out of the realm of melodrama. But this intimate, personal and otherwise fresh take on the immigrant experience in a place that resists immigration like an island stuffed with Arizona sheriffs has rewards enough to keep us engaged in this kid’s story, start to finish.

MPAA Rating: unrated, smoking, profanity

Cast: Yulai Lü, Tatsuya Fuji, Sayo Akasaka, Kio Matsumoto

Credits: Written and directed by Kei Chikaura. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time: 1:56