Movie Nation

If this is where the Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg filmmaking team winds up, making gritty-jokey “Spenser” movies for Netflix, I’m fine with that.

Tone counts for everything in action mysteries like this, and the team that made “Lone Survivor,” “Deepwater Horizon,” “Patriots Day” and the debacle “Mile 22” know each other’s strengths and play to them.

Maybe their movies don’t make financial sense on the big screen any more. Maybe both have lost their fastballs. Maybe Walhberg’s box office is fading away as he approaches 50. That doesn’t mean that Netflix’s deep pockets can’t production value/screen rights/screenwriter their way out of that.

“Spenser Confidential,” an origin-story franchise-starter based on Robert P. Parker’s famous two-fisted Boston detective, doesn’t have a lot of mystery going for it. Logic kind of goes out the window in the still-amusingly-gonzo finale. But they cover the basics and touch all the bases in this brawling, bloody tale of a cop who gets out of prison just in time to clear a fellow cop’s name, and to settle old scores.

We meet the title character as he’s throwing his career away by tossing a spouse-abusing/murder-investigation-quashing captain out into the snow.

Five years later, Spenser is “popular,” so he’s told…in prison. But he needs to get out of Boston when he gets out of the joint. Some guys explain it to him in the prison library.

“How’s the Aryan Brotherhood treatin’ everybody?” Making nice won’t help.

“Did you just KICK me, Bro?”

Spenser’s problems don’t go away outside, either. There’s whatever gang holds a grudge, the cops who remember and hate him, and the vengeful, violent ex-girlfriend (Iliza Shlesinger of Wahlberg’s “Instant Family” bomb).

Good thing he’s got old boxing gym pal Henry (Alan Arkin) picking him and putting a roof over his head. Sure, he’s got to share his room with this “giant” mixed martial artist in training, Hawk (deadpan Winston Duke, a hulking sight gag). He’s got to share his old beagle, too. Pearl loves Hawk.

And Henry’s aged automobile, The River (Buick Riviera)? Well, at least he can use that when he needs it, until he gets on his feet out of truck driving school. Spenser’s got a plan — become a trucker, move to Arizona.

Not likely. Not with cops meeting untimely ends the moment he gets out of jail. Not with that “Southie” accent, either. His old partner (Bokeem Woodbine) may not be much help, but pretty soon, Spenser’s in the thick of it — getting his ass kicked, wearing cuts and bruises he adds to every other scene, brawling his way to some answers.

Berg sets the tone with the first BIG inter-title, stating the obvious about a location — “PRISON.”

The second, “SOUTHIE,” is just as comically subtle.

They hit a classic Boston Irish pub favored by the cops, Fenway for a little “Sweet Caroline,” stage the fights to classic rock’s greatest hits by Boston — from Boston — and Aerosmith, also from Boston.

They joke about how the world has changed while Spenser was in stir. Where’s this surveillance video? In the CLOUD?

“What the f— is the CLOUD? Don’t PLAY with me, now!”

It took a long time and a lot of movies with Will Ferrell, but Wahlberg’s got the timing and intonation to make things funny now. I also like the coarse, not-at-all-network-TV-friendly language and violence the character is immersed in here. Spenser feels up-to-date, street-wise.

The psycho-ex-girlfriend stuff is tired, the endless machete attacks by gang members repetitive and all-too-convenient. A gun would have finished the job in a flash.

But as drawn-out as the buildup is, as goofy and illogical as the the finale is, it’s just fun enough to make you think, “OK, that wasn’t a complete waste of two hours. When’re you doing another?”

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language throughout and sexual content

Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Winston Duke, Iliza Shlesinger, Alan Arkin,  and Bokeem Woodbine.

Credits: Directed by Peter Berg, script by Sean O’Keefe and Brian Helgeland, based on the Ace Atkins novel based on Robert Parker’s “Spenser” character. A Netflix Original.

Running time: 1:51

Olivia Munn is the big name from this side of the pond in this Britcom/Romcom. But Freida Pinto’s a big deal internationally, and Sam Claflin’s pretty high up in the name rec charts.

Writer-director Dean Craig?He did “Death at a Funeral,” so this could be hilarity on your streaming screen.

It’s a remake of a French rom-com “Plan de table.” Oh the Brits LOVE borrowing from the French.

Lionsgate’s got a no-budget/no-name cast cult thriller in the making, here.

The opening image of “Bye Bye Germany” is of a three-legged dog, hopping out of a “Displaced Persons” repatriation camp in Frankfort months after the end of World War II.

That’s the perfect metaphor for the story to be told in this After the Holocaust tale. How could a three-legged dog survive the war? You don’t really want to know.

This mostly “true story” (“and what isn’t true is nevertheless correct.”) is about a group of survivors — from camps and elsewhere — who team up to hustle Germans in order to secure the cash to escape the Nazi-infested homeland that tried so hard to kill them.

Moritz Bleibtreu, most famous for “Run Lola Run,” plays David Bermann, a well-turned-out Jewish survivor who keeps his shoes shiny, his mustache trim and his cigarettes in a shiny, gold cigarette holder.

And he’s having trouble getting a U.S. occupying Army license to do business. The big question for most anybody on either side of the conflict is “What did you do in the war?” For a German Jew, it’s trickier. “How did YOU survive?”

He talks a shoemaker, Holzmann (Mark Ivanir), into partnering with him, just until they have the cash to flee to America. Holzmann will get the license to do business and pose as “the boss.” The “real” boss Bermann recruits “peddlers,” salesmen — with a cutthroat eye for closing a deal.

“What do Germans need most right now? Linens!”

Working in teams, scanning the obituaries to pick out their marks, scamming whole groups (railway workers, postal workers), they will prey on “German guilt” over the genocide carried out, directly or in their name, by Germans against Jews, Gypsies and gays.

“Germans feel guilty?” one potential salesman is puzzled to learn.

Everybody Bermann recruits has a story, one they’re barely willing to sketch in. This fellow served in the French Foreign Legion’s “Jewish Brigade,” that one “was saved by some German named Schindler.” An actor hid under the stage of a theater, another lost an eye spending the war in occupied Shanghai.

“Hitler is dead,” is Bermann’s pep talk to his hustlers. “But we’re still alive!”

This picaresque adventure, passing themselves off as a doctor (“Say what you want about Jews,” one not-quite-closeted-Nazi enthuses, “but they make the BEST doctors!”), as a combat veteran who served with a son who died in the Army, doesn’t always go according to scheme. But it’s a delightful form of payback that grabs an ugly stereotype of “Jews in business” and runs with it.

And nobody gets cheated, really. They’re just talked into buying French linen from people they don’t often realize are Jewish.

But this fairytale-like fable — the original title “Es war einmal in Deutschland” translates as “Once Upon a Time in Germany” — has a darker-than-dark subtext. The one thing the solitary (save for his three-legged dog, Motek) Bermann keeps from his comrades is that he’s being grilled, several times a week, by a prosecutor from the U.S. Army (Antje Traue). And under her questioning, Bermann spins (mostly in German, with English subtitles) a fantastic version of his “How did you survive the war?” story.

German-Jewish director Sam Garbarski, working from a script by the author of the books this story is based on, strikes a near perfect balance in this familiar “survivor’s guilt” version of a Holocaust tale. There’s a little of “Sophie’s Choice,” of “Enemies, a Love Story” here.

The lightness comes from Bermann & Co.’s hustles, and from the standout skill he supposedly had in the camps — telling jokes — and even from the racist Nazis’ idea of humor.

“Bermann, do you know why so many of you are in concentration camps? Because you heard it’s FREE!”

The film’s darkness come from the effrontery of anyone, especially an American, questioning any survivor about what they did to survive. Ponder that question for a second yourself and maybe you’ll see the wide range of answers that should be acceptable.

“Anything I had to.”

The film’s “getting even with the Germans” element has a dark side, too. But compare the sober and very human reaction of the men gathered for this enterprise to the violent vengeance cartoon “Hunters” on Amazon and repent for ever wasting your time on that.

It’s true, what Robert Palmer used to sing, that “Wise men know that revenge does not taste sweet.” And every Ricky Gervais Golden Globes crack about “Holocaust” movies, that there have been more than seem humanly necessary committed to film, is true enough, too.

But “Bye Bye Germany” makes for a sly, smart, funny and still touching peek into that horrid past, a dramedy with pathos and a reminder that “L’chaim, to life” is the best way to remember it — with a toast to life. In the end, that’s the best revenge of all.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, adult situations

Cast: Moritz Bleibtreu, Antje Traue, Tim Seyi, Mark Ivanir, Václav Jakoubek

Credits: Directed by Sam Garbarski, script by and Michel Bergmann and Sam Garbarski, based on the novel by Michel Bergmann. A Film Movement Plus release.

Running time:

“Summer’s Night” plays like the bastard child of Richard “Slacker” Linklater and Cameron “Singles” Crowe, lashing out, rebelling against its parents by being charmless, humorless and clueless about its own blindness and inadequacies. I was amazed at how writer Jordan Jolliff and director Joseph Cross could get even the littlest things so wrong.

If you’ve never heard of “Summer Night” before Netflix, consider what they put on the poster advertising it — “Thirteen friends. One night to get it right.”

Aside from the honesty of that ad — because they DON’T “get it right” — what does that tell you the movie is about? Nothing.

In an unidentified college (apparently) town (Newnam, Georgia — and Atlanta), a bunch of college-age slackers date, recreate, drink shots, play in bands at a movie house turned bar called The Alamo, or drink shots and listen to their friends bands at The Alamo.

Mel (Analeigh Tipton) has her girls (Lana Condor, Melina Vidler) with her when the pregnancy test comes out positive. Her boyfriend Seth (Ian Nelson)? He’s down at the swimming hole, getting high with Jameson (Ellar Coltrane, star of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”).

Seth gets the news via text, but hey — his band’s playing at The Alamo tonight. Lot to process. Sober.

Taylor (Callan McAuliffe, who was already in Georgia filming a “Walking Dead” spinoff) is off trail-riding on a mountain bike when he’s jumped and robbed by rednecks. Luckily, Dana (Ella Hunt of “Anna and the Apocalypse”) is there to nurse his wounds. In the woods.

Jack “Rabbit” (Bill Milner) has a thing for Lexi (Ms. Condor), and Andy (Justin Chatwin) plays in the band with Seth and Caleb (Hayden Szeto).

They’ll work everything out over drinks and some jangling/sensitive alt-pop (a banjo makes an appearance) at The Alamo, where Corin (Elena Kampouris) takes the cover charge at the door, crushes on Jameson and is appalled when he shows up with the assertive, confident and seriously sexy Harmony (Victoria Justice, a long way from TV’s “Victorious”).

Is that “thirteen friends?” Lemme recount.

That two-gorgeous women contending for a pretty guy dynamic — “male wish fulfillment fantasy” in screenwriter speak — plays out twice in “Summer Night,” one of a myriad of crimes committed by screenwriter Jordan Jolliff. Seth takes Dana to the bar (she’s underage) and has to contend with the undesired come-ons of bombshell Vanessa (Vidler).

Fortunately, there’s a Magical Negro (Khris Davis), hanging by the door, smoking, to advise his young white friends.

“You can’t build a house using your head for a hammer!”

Well, at least he gets the character count to “thirteen.”

Damn, this is dumb. There are only a couple of truly quotable lines — Caleb’s withering put-down of Seth getting Mel pregnant — “This isn’t 1937!” — is one. Hot Hot Harmony’s aloof expectation of slavish devotion is another.

“I don’t date guys who’re SORTA into me.”

Otherwise, the long, musical evening (Hop Along tunes are played, apparently, another band steals the name of ’80s myth The Barking Spiders) adds up to a lot of nothing at all. Nothing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, smoking, drinking, profanity

Cast: Analeigh Tipton, Ellar Coltrane, Victoria Justice, Ian Nelson, Callum MacAuliffe, Lana Condor, Elena Kampouris  and Bill Milner

Credits: Directed by Joseph Cross, script by Jordan Jolliff. A Samuel L. Goldwyn release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

You kind of forget that Bill Forsyth’s charming “Gregory’s Girl” begins with a bunch of thick-accented Scots mop tops leering through the window at a nurse disrobing in the dressing room at the local hospital.

“She’s go’a BRA-zere!”

Maybe this one isn’t aging well at all, you fret, post #MeToo.

And then this 1980 jewel takes you right back to what made it an indie phenomenon and launched Forsyth’s distinctly quirky career (“Local Hero” and “Breaking In”). It may be ostensibly from the boy’s point of view, but Gregory (John Gordon Sinclair) is harmless, gangly, and gawky. More to the point, he is hapless and helpless in the commanding presence of more together (more “sorted” as they say in the UK) girls his own age.

The “girl” (Dee Hepburn) is the fetching jogger/classmate who joins Gregory’s soccer team, in essence displacing him. Dorothy has game. She’s ahead of her time. The sports bra hadn’t been invented and she may not “bend it like Beckham,” but then, “Beckham” was five years old when this film came out.

And as for style, “Gregory’s Girl” was adorably “random” before “random” was a thing.

Forsyth set his tale in colorless “modern” Scottish suburbia, in a high school where Gregory’s best mates are Andy (Robert Buchanan), dead-serious about home ec class baking as if he’s found a trade, and Steve (Billy Greenlees), who is a shorter and slightly more outgoing than Gregory, if just as helpless with the girls.

“D’ye knoooow that 12 tonnes of Cornflakes pass under here every day?”

Everybody wears the same tie, more or less the same uniform and all the lads — at least — have matching Bay City Rollers shag cuts.

Whatever soccer skill Gregory had evaporated when he hit a growth spurt. The coach (Jake D’Arcy) may fret over eight straight losses. Gregory, formerly a star striker? No worries. A demotion to goalie, with a threat to cut the shambolic goof altogether?

“You won’t regret this,” he grins. God knows he won’t.

And then Dorothy shows up, and “shows up” the lads. Gregory’s life has purpose, “obsessed with a beautiful, unattainable girl” purpose.

The random stuff begins almost right away. Gregory and his wiser 11 year-old sister (Allison Forster) live middle-class lives largely without the supervision of parents. His dad (Dave Anderson) is a driving instructor whose student almost runs his kid over on his (late) way to school. This is the only time we meet a parent.

“Your mother…you remember your mother? I told her we met briefly in the hallway last week…”

Teachers giggle through the window of the teacher’s lounge at Gregory’s oddball/dodgeball way of crossing fields and lawns to get to class. Somebody in a penguin costume shows up in the hallway, never says a word, and one random teacher glances at her and says “Room 6.” A scene or two later, same thing, another teacher — “Room 14” this time.

Gregory spends a few seconds on the drums before any given day’s departure for school, walks out the door and is surrounded by scores of unexplained pre-schoolers. Every day.

A little boy who is baby-sister Madeleine’s age has more poise, polish and manners when it comes to knocking on their door than Gregory ever will.

The photographer for the school magazine, Eric (Alan Love), has a mini-me younger fanboy who does everything — gestures, etc. — that Eric does.

It’s a movie peppered with cackle-out-loud goofy touches, quirky line-readings, mock outrage and “tolerance” even though “GerrULLLS wair’no MADE t’play foo-ball!”

“It’s MODairn. It’s the FUTURE!”

Indeed it was.

“Gregory’s Girl” is pretty much as funny as it ever was and is, if anything, even quainter than when it came out. Gregory’s obsession with “brown” means making him over is a particular challenge for baby sister.

Forsyth’s penchant for whimsy, aka those “random” touches, means that it hits several points where we’re sure it’s over, and sure enough, it isn’t. The third act could be tighter. The “kids” are unaffected, quite natural. But none of them went on to major careers. Nor for that matter did Forsyth — just a handful of films, one of them a sequel I couldn’t get through a few years back.

But any doubt that there are teen comedy “classics” of the 80s that don’t have Chicagoan John Hughes’ name in the credits is erased in a flash.

Need an excuse to try Film Movement Plus for a month? It’s streaming there through May Day.

MPAA Rating: PG (nudity)

Cast: John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn, Jake D’Arcy. Clare Grogan, Robert Buchanan and Billy Greenlees

Credits: Written and directed by Bill Forsyth. A Film Movement+ release.

Running time: 1:31

“Indian Horse” is a hockey story serving as an expose of Canada’s infamous Catholic “Residential School” system and the horrors it inflicted on generations of indigenous people there.

Based on a popular novel by acclaimed Ojibway fiction writer Richard Wagamese, it covers familiar ground in the long litany of stories about abusive Catholic priests that burst into the light with “The Boys of St. Vincent,” and the monstrous crimes of such schools (“Older Than America,” “We Were Children”).

So don’t look at the picture of the hockey player on the Netflix menu and figure this is just a feel-good “against all odds” story on skates. It’s conventional in that regard, but its subtext leads to powerful moments that sometimes let it transcend its genre.

We see the cruel and near-genocidal “system” through the eyes of one Ojibway child’s experience, recalled through flashbacks decades later at a support group for those who survived the experience, and were traumatized by it. Opening titles note that this idea — removing Native children from their families for trade schools aimed at assimilating (and indoctrinating in Catholic teachings) Indigenous people into white, mainstream Canadian culture began in 1876, and didn’t truly end until — get this, 1996.

Thousands died, physical and sexual abuse was rampant. As the adult Saul Indian Horse narrates, “They called it a school, but it was never that. The only test was whether you could endure it.”

It’s no wonder his family goes to extremes to spare him and his brother the experience. In 1959 they are spirited away by their parents and their grandmother (Edna Manitowabi) from Manitouwadge to “our ancestral lands to the North.”

It’s a perilous journey by canoe, and Saul’s brother sickens and dies on the trip. His parents leave him with his grandmother, but the long arm of the Canadian government finds him and throws him into an environment where whippings are administered for not speaking English, for clinging to a younger sibling scared to death at being away from her family, for just about anything.

“The Lord God is your Father now,” the abusive nuns (Emily Klassen plays a particularly vile one) and priest headmaster (Michael Murphy).

But the new priest (Michiel Huisman of “Game of Thrones” and “The Other Lamb”) in charge of the school hockey team gives little Saul something to look forward to. He is too young to play, but teaching him to skate on the sly shows Saul (Sladen Peltier) to be a natural. Before long he’s rejecting escape attempts by his equally oppressed classmates just for the chance to show his stuff.

The story takes us through those formative years, jumps ahead to the late ’60s when Saul stars for an Indigenous semi-pro team, and endures the awful racism white Canadians hurled at Natives in virtually every public setting.

And then a coach (Martin Donovan) for a minor league team connected with the Toronto Maple Leaf sees Saul (Ajuawak Kapashesit) and convinces him that his innate feel for “THEIR game” — meaning white Canada’s national sport and obsession — lets him “conjure” magic on the ice, and the kid is put on track to the NHL.

Clint Eastwood’s longtime camera operator Stephen S. Campanelli directed “Indian Horse,” and does a solid job of recreating hockey in the pre-helmet era. Good editing can make half-speed games look realistic, and that’s important as the film is hockey-centric for its middle acts.

But Wagamese’s story doesn’t let us off the hook with just hockey. His novel came out before Canada’s long-overdue “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” reckoning with what generations were put through. The story’s ugly underbelly keeps it downbeat, even when we expect it to turn uplifting.

And the unfortunate fact that the big revelations here are depressingly over-familiar works against the movie, allowing us the time to notice the flat and amateurish nature of some performances and the polished, over-familiar archetypes even the screen veterans are playing.

In Canada, “Indian Horse” was labeled “much more than a movie,” which is almost certainly true thanks to its message and what it depicts. But the film lacks shock and catharsis, just a depressing recreation of awful things.

As cinema, it’s somewhat less than it could have been, lacking the emotional highs and lows that compelling characters compellingly played could have given it. Saul is stoic, first scene to last. And the villains never rise to the level of unforgettable the way “The Boys of St. Vincent” made Martin Czerny a movie star.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual abuse, alcohol abuse

Cast: Sladen Peltier, Forrest Goodluck, Edna Manitowabi, Ajuawak Kapashesit, Michiel Huisman, Martin Donovan, Emily Klassen and Michael Murphy

Credits: Directed by Stephen S. Campanelli, script by Dennis Foon, based on the novel by Richard Wagamese.

Running time: 1:42

Here’s the way the brain wanders.

You’ve just finished reading “The Story of Spanish,” are just now starting on the equally breezy, informal and informative “The Story of French,” books that combine travel with history, geography, etymology and phonetics.

You review two Midlands moviesfrom the UK, whose characters have accents you couldn’t cut through with a chainsaw. You reference the “My Fair Lady” song “Why Can’t the English?” (speak bloody comprehensible English) in one of the reviews.

And then “Pygmalion” pops up, George Bernard Shaw’s delightfully dated and sexist play about “Posh Accents Make the Lady…or Gentlemen” which he helped adapt for the screen in 1938. And as I hadn’t seen it in this millennium, well why not? Aside from loathing most of “My Fair Lady” (which adapted “Pygmalion” into a musical) and having had to review it on the stage maybe half a dozen times over the years, I mean.

Leslie Howard, most famous for “Gone With the Wind,” was at the top of his profession and the top of his game for this classic-to-be, even taking a co-directing credit to make sure his close-ups were all they could be.

He’s Professor Henry Higgins, phonetics, speech and accent expert, “confirmed bachelor” and misogynist.

Wendy Hiller is a perfectly believable braying Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle.

And Scott Sunderland is the phonetics academic Col. Pickering, freshly back from The Raj (India) who returned to London just to meet “My dear Higgins.”

They meet at Piccadilly, as Higgins puts on a show of guessing every street urchin (Liza), pickpocket and society swell’s home and birthplace simply by their accent.

He teaches, too, and that’s how the callous bet is made — that the braggart can turn the grubby flower seller, whom he labels “you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language,” into a young lady who could pass for a member of polite society — nobility, even.

“My Fair Lady,” remember, was an Edwardian pre-WWI period piece. Howard and Shaw’s “Pygmalian” was contemporaneous, a pre-WWII comedy with state-of-the-art speech therapy technology (a phonograph recorder, etc.). That makes for cute (not that funny) teaching montages.

The class consciousness of the piece is much sharper when all those songs and regal non-singer Audrey Hepburn aren’t around.

The banter crackles, the insults fly and this Higgins is close enough to Eliza’s age to not be a creeper, even if Eliza’s extortion-minded pop (Wilfrid Lawson) suggests as much.

Musicals work their magic by folding in songs when the emotion of the moment is too great for mere words or longing, lusty looks to do. And knowing both plays and films, you can’t help but miss a couple of the emotional/musical highs.

The finale drags in “Pygmalion” in a way “My Fair Lady” — a front-loaded musical (most of the best songs are before intermission) — rarely has.

But everything before that finale just sings, without music. It’s a deliciously smart and wordy comedy from the age when Hollywood — on this side of the pond — was thinking “screwball” in its approach to the great class divide.

Howard was a fey leading man, something underscored by “Gone with the Wind” and carried to the level of joke in “49th Parallel.” But he’s perfect here, prissy and able to treat females and everybody else with a dismissive harrumph that plays as asexual.

And Hiller, personally chosen by Shaw for the film, was just coarse and common enough to take to the makeover like a butterfly.

“I washed me face and hands before I come, I did!”

Whatever the virtues of “My Fair Lady,” it is “Pygmalion” that’s aging well, a black and white jewel properly enshrined as a classic.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, dated allusions

Cast: Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson, Scott Sunderland, David Tree and Marie Lohr.

Credits : Directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, script by George Bernard Shaw, based on his play.  A Criterion release, also on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube, etc.

Running time: 1:29

The older boy has a cassette record to play with, like many children of the late ’70s. His toddler brother has no shortage of plastic tools and toys, Legos and the like.

There’s a dog and a parakeet, too. Rich, the oldest, needs a pair of shoes. Let’s go off the shops.

But neglect has many faces, and two parents who seem disinterested at best, wrapped up in their smokes, their drinks and a kitchen sink melodrama they’re too dim to see themselves starring in it have those faces. “Ray & Liz,” their son Richard, “Rich” back then remembers them.

Birmingham “Black Country” photographer Richard Billingham came to fame documenting his parents and their tiny, dysfunctional and circumscribed lives. “Ray & Liz,” his feature film directing debut, shows him still mining their myopia, an adult now with a score to settle.

In 108 spare, harrowing minutes, we see the walls closing in on a family that’s given up, never equipped to deal with the despair of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Ray (Justin Salinger) and Liz (a fierce Ella Smith) are self-absorbed and self-medicating. And their kids, tracked over the course of half a dozen years, are “free range,” raising themselves, trapped in lives with a very low ceiling and inclined to mimic the callous cruelty their parents teach them with every puff of a cigarette.

There’s no back-story here, and no subtitles for these porridge-thick accents. It’s cheating to tell you that Ray lost his last good job, as a machinist, before events in the movie play out. They weren’t always “Council Flats” (subsidized housing) poor, on the dole, living from handout check to handout. But we can tell something took this couple out of the work force and made them all but check out of life as well.

Billingham doesn’t tell us who this “Lol” (Tony Way) is, an oaf of an uncle (perhaps) who does his best Charles Laughton as the Hunchback impression for little Rich’s cassette recorder. As she and Ray and Rich prep to go shoe shopping, Liz makes a naked threat to Lol that suggests a lifetime of conflict. He’d better keep an eye on little Jason. He’d BETTER not get into their liquor.

That’s not remotely as cruel as what Will (Sam Gittins) pulls when he gets home. He’s their lodger, has a touch of just-out-of-jail about him.

And what’s he do when Lol asks about the liquor? He produces a crate of it, gets Lol passed-out drunk and empties his wallet. And oh yeah, Will paints baby Jason’s face with boot polish and puts a carving knife in the child’s hand. Will then beats a retreat, only returning to see Liz’s beat-the-stupefied-Lol to a pulp meltdown over the scene she finds when the family gets home.

A few years later, the family’s fortunes have moved them from a modest duplex to those Council Flats. Rich is a self-sufficient teen, but younger Jason (Joshua Millard-Lloyd) is taking the brunt of this “raise yourself” ethos.

One thing they’ve both absorbed is the cruelty. Joking around, Jason sticks things in passed-out-dad’s mouth, the last of which is powdered punch. Ray almost chokes.

When the power’s cut off, Jason goes on a wander into the cold, dark night. And that gets “the authorities” involved.

Billingham’s film is built on the “kitchen sink” realism born in British cinema in the early ’60s, perfected by the likes of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. It is grim, grey and overcast world and a hard watch, and not just because of those “cold-blooded murder of the English tongue” accents.

Framing the story within the 1990s final years of Ray (Patrick Romer) and Liz (Deirdre Kelly) doesn’t ease that burden. They’re apart, but connected — still drinking (he is, anyway), still selfishly self-absorbed, still badgering cash off each other to purchase some fresh impulse.

The movie memoir “Ray & Liz” most reminds me of is “Running With Scissors,” with “Ray” being a more bleak and humorless look back at a less-than-rosy childhood, less obviously a story told by a son with scores to settle.

But whatever Billingham took from this struggle to make his art, make no mistake –he’s settling a score, here.

The cinematography darkens the tone, the performances — especially Smith, Way and young Millard-Lloyd, revel in reality. And if at the end we feel no more for “Ray & Liz” than they apparently did for their own kids, that’s a final, cruel endorsement of the truth acted-out by all involved.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, alcoholism, profanity

Cast: Ella Smith, Justin Salinger, Deirdre Kelly, Patrick Romer, Joshua Millard-Lloyd, Tony Way and Sam Gittins

Credits: Written and directed by Richard Billingham. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:48

“Northern Soul”was a fad, a movement, that came just after the Mods and Psychedelia, concurrent with Glam Rock and just before Disco and Punk conquered those music-mad Brits.

It got people in the north and Midlands of England back on the dance floor, listening to obscure African American soul music in the ugly fashions of the early ’70s. And as they did, many of them got deeper into the pills that replaced most of the popular drugs of the ’60s.

Photographer turned writer-director Elaine Constantine tries to give this milieu a sort of “Commitments” meets “24 Hour Party People” treatment in her film of the same title, a movie that vividly recaptures a time and place — with the odd stand-out anachronism.

But in trying to get the music to “sound” the way it did then, pre-hi fi 45rpm records heard through Stone Age speakers and gear, she wastes every single pence the picture spent on music rights. No, we weren’t listening to amplified mud, dear.

And robbing the story of the hook, the actual sounds that young fans grabbed and turned into a lifestyle and movement, gives us a movie that’s basically without music or the romance of it, and without a whiff of the last gasp of pre-punk/pre-Thatcher joy.

Elliot James Langridge plays an anti-social schoolboy whose parents (Lisa Stansfield and Christian McKay) nag him into attending an after school youth club. He doesn’t necessarily fit in there, either. But the music by local DJ Ray (James Lance) puts him in a trance. He dances by himself.

And when he later meets fellow enthusiast Matt (Josh Whitehouse), John finds his entre to “cool” (Matt gives him a fashion makeover) and deep fandom. It’s all about haunting record stores and street bazaars, hunting for soul that nobody else has heard.

That’s their ticket for doing their own DJing. The goal? To fly to America together to REALLY dig into obscure soul music at its source.

John fancies the cute slightly older nurse (Antonia Thomas) he sees on the bus each day. What he doesn’t fancy is the oppressive school and his tuned-out teacher (Steve Coogan, of “24 Hour Party People”).

And what Matt fancies are the drugs that he listens to the music to.

The rest of the movie is about their unequal partnership and its shifting dynamics, their rise to DJing paid dances, their growing circle of drug-abusing pals, and their fall.

The performances are energetic but downcast. The dialect is as unfathomable as the music, although I did catch Frankie Valli’s name in the introduction of a song. Edwin Starr to Leo Sayer, Shirley Ellis to The Velvets, the soundtrack (what you can make out of it) ties the film to this generation’s obsession, not unlike the earlier Beatles/Stones generation Brits brought to its deep dive into The Blues.

Whatever its virtues (Tattoos were NOT on every torso back then, especially in the Midlands), one can’t take much more from “Northern Soul” than a moving snapshot, a color scheme. Because “Soul” is the big thing lacking in Elaine Constantine’s one and only shot at making a feature film.

MPAA Rating: R for drug use, language throughout and brief sexuality

Cast:Elliot James Langridge, Josh Whitehouse, Antonia Thomas, James Lance, Christian McKay and Steve Coogan.

Credits Written and directed by Elaine Constantine: A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:42