Movie Nation

Did you see the British comedy “Swimming With Men?” It was a twee but melancholy Rob Brydon/Jim Carter vehicle, a “Full Monty” set against a synchronized swimming story.

“Sink or Swim” is the same movie, more or less, set in France. They don’t credit each other, don’t share a screenwriter and came out at roughly the same time — last year.

They share a story arc, story beats and the characters are eerily similar if just different enough to dodge EU plagiarism lawsuits.

Coincidence or not, if you’ve seen the first (released in the U.S. first), there’s no need to see the second, unless you’re polishing up your French or have an undying passion to see anything Mathieu Amalric or Guillaume Canet star in.

Both are about downtrodden men who bond in the pool, underwater and in the locker room or bar after practice.

Everybody is dealing with something. Men tend to suffer the trials of life — a long bout of unemployment, a failing business, a job that is being replaced by a computer, unhappy or strained marriages — by themselves.

As in “The Full Monty,” their self-esteem is boosted when they are given connections, a purpose and a far-fetched goal.

Truth be told, the best bits of both might get one combined me toscript in the general ball park of “Full Monty.” The French/Belgian co-production tries more ideas out, and is almost half an hour longer to prove it. Like the characters it portrays, neither “water ballet” comedy truly stands up on its own.

Amalric (“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) is Bertrand, father of two, long-unemployed, with a most indulgent wife (Marina Foïs) and a far less indulgent, contemptuous teen.

He has to bike to job interviews because his wife is supporting them and needs the car. He’s in the habit of piling his daily depression pills into his bowl of cereal for breakfast.

A flyer recruiting swimmers for this “team” at the local pool gets his interest. He walks in just as Laurent (Canet, recently seen in “Non-Fiction,” but in “Farewell,” “Joyeux Noel,” and many other films) is throwing another tantrum.

Laurent is forever on edge and venting his frustration onto others for it. We get a hint of why when we see him chew out a doctor working with his stuttering son. That marriage is not long for this world.

The chipper Thierry (Philippe Katerine), “Titi,” maintains the public pool, a lonely, loveless man who still manages a smile in a life without hope.

Marcus (Benoît Poelvoorde) is older, delusional about the pool selling business he’s under water in. Simon is a divorced, 50ish rock guitarist who serves at his daughter’s high school cafeteria, embarrassing her no end. And so on.

Everybody here is dealing with something. That includes the upbeat, nurturing (to outside eyes, anyway) coach, Delphine (Virginie Efira). She reads the guys poetry as part of the coaching, and she’s very protective of this support group.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demands of Bertrand, before counseling all seven swimmers to “find our inner woman.”

Delphine used to be a competitive synchronized swimmer. Her past, “an incident,” is why she’s doing this, now.

The men must develop grace and practice holding their breath. And once they discover, online, that they’re not alone, they have another goal.

This business of men taking up a women’s sport (the subject of some abuse) has taken hold all over Europe (in Britain, too, of course). The “world championships” will be in Norway.

“Swimming with Men” did a much better job of setting up the “discovery” of the sport and the team. “Sink or Swim” is more obvious in its “The Full Monty” borrowings.

Truthfully, the French film manages a grin or two in the first hour. But its first real laugh is when a furious wheelchair-bound martinet (Leïla Bekhti) shows up to take over the training.

Amanda puts the “slap” into slapstick and the tough love into pushing Team France.

“We just want to take part,” they plead. “Miss Ironsides” isn’t having it.

“Sink or Swim” goes down for the second time before she shows up, and founders for the third time despite her arrival.

It’s well-acted and broadly sympathetic, but a time-killer of a comedy that kills too much time for its own good.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, pill abuse

Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Guillaume Canet, Benoît Poelvoorde, Virginie Efira, Marina Foïs, Leïla Bekhti, Philippe Katerine

Credits: Directed by Gilles Lellouche, script by Ahmed Hamidi, Julien Lambroschini and Gilles Lellouche. A Level Film/Studio Canal release.

Running time: 1:59

Here’s a career retrospective documentary that began life as “21 Years: Quentin Tarantino,” and was finished a few years ago (2017) — brushed up, repurposed, re-titled and released on the heels of a very successful run of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”

Footage from the trailer to “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” was added to the coda of a film that considers Quentin Tarantino’s Hollywood films, from “Reservoir Dogs” to “The Hateful Eight.”

It leaves out Tarantino’s first feature-length directing and co-writing credit, 1987’s “My Best Friend’s Birthday.”

“Not canonical?” OK.

So,  he’s nine films into his career — “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Jackie Brown, “Kill Bill Vol. 1.,” “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Django Unchained,” “The Hateful Eight” and “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.”

That means leaving out “Death Proof” from “Grind House,” which “QT8″ covers,  and his contribution to another anthology,” Four Rooms,” which “QT8” ignores.

And then there were his “True Romance” and “From Dusk Til Dawn” scripts, the story for Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.”

So purists will have a lot to bicker about before the credits to “QT8” roll on this Fathom Events Oct. 21 release (at a theater near you).

And I’ve burned through hundreds of words just getting past the inaccuracy/problems with the title.

Filmmaker Tara Wood — she also did a “21 Years: Richard Linklater” documentary — doesn’t interview Tarantino for the film. She uses quotations by him and the barest slivers of footage of him, on sets, etc., and lots and lots of interviews with actors who have worked with him, or owe their careers or “comebacks” to their association with “QT.”

So it’s not exactly a critical reconsideration of the filmmaker’s work, a deep dive into his biography to connect it to the work. Nobody’s here to challenge the assertion that he’s “the voice of his generation.”

But no matter. What is here is fun, enlightening and entertaining.

One Tarantino quotation that sticks out — “If you love movies enough, you can make a good one.” You can’t argue that he doesn’t, and even a hater would have to give it to him that he has.

The actors take us through the Tarantino universe, the connections between this guy in “Reservoir Dogs” and that one in “Pulp Fiction,” the possible kinship of bad hombres from “The Hateful Eight” to bad hombres in films set later.

Michael Madsen, who launched his career with “Reservoir Dogs” and still managed to turn down the Travolta role in “Pulp Fiction,” remembers telling the writer-director, “I don’t want to be killed by Tim Roth! Who’s HE?” (“Reservoir Dogs”).

And Roth taunts Madsen back over the actor’s refusal to do his sadistic little Golden Oldies torture dance in “Dogs.”

The film breaks into chapters — “Chapter 2: Badass Women & Genre Play.”

We get a taste of Tarantino’s influences, Kubrick’s “The Killing” and Ringo Lam’s Hong Kong thriller “City on Fire.”

And stars like Robert Forster marvel over Jackie Brown’s long, romantic walk out of prison towards his character in “Jackie Brown” — “They never DO that.” Christoph Waltz talks of how Tarantino “uses filmic vocabulary,” Jennifer Jason Leigh opines that “He writes strong women like nobody’s business” and more than one performer confirms his on-set demeanor, how he speaks in “movie shorthand.”

A good take will earn an “Ok, we GOT that. But we’re gonna do ONE more. Why? Because we LOVE making movies!”

Eli Roth, Lucy Liu and others speak of screenplays “that read like a novel…He’s adapting his own novels to the screen,” of how he writes scripts in longhand “because you can’t compose poetry on a computer.”

Kurt Russell, the great stuntwoman/actress Zoe Bell, and many others speak.

Nobody talks about the QT crutches, how unwatchable his movies can be merely by removing the offensive language (“American Movie Classics” my arse!) and the easy laughs the Samuel L. Jackson profane and un-PC soliloquies provide.

The indulgent longueurs (most emphatically overdone with Brad Pitt in a car in “Once Upon a Time…”), the inane and dated pop culture debates — in every film save for “The Hateful Eight” — the junk TV and Z-movies referenced.

Listen to Steve Buscemi’s Mr. Pink talk about what he “deems” to be true, and wonder how many low-life thugs you’ve ever heard use words like “deems.”

And Harvey Weinstein hangs over Tarantino and “QT8,” an animated ogre (literally) who was exposed (in Oct. 2017) just as this documentary was being finished, a stain on Tarantino’s legacy that he has acknowledged and been self-critical about.

It’s not the definitive Tarantino documentary in the way works about John Ford, Woody Allen, Hitchcock, Kubrick and others have been. But with Tarantino long threatening to get ten films in the can and make a graceful exit, stage left, it’s good enough to suggest the rough framework of such a retrospective.

Only a smart aleck would point out, “But with ‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’ that makes it ten feature films ALREADY made, without counting the long shorts “Four Rooms” and “Death Proof.”

Because that might deprive us of a Quentin Tarantino “Star Trek” movie.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence and profanity

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz, Michael Madsen, Lucy Liu, Tim Roth, Diane Kruger, Jamie FoxxJennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Eli Roth and Zoe Bell.

Credits: Written and directed by Tara Wood. A Wood Entertainment/Fathom Events release.

Running time: 1:40

It was, and remains, the most frightening science fiction film ever made.

“Alien” was a  watershed picture when it hit theaters in 1979, like an anti-“Star Wars” “Close Encounters of the Terminal Kind.”

It had an unstoppable, insectoid monster attacking the working class crew of a damp, dark, grimy working space tug in the remote reaches of the cosmos.

The film’s graphic violence began with an interspecies “male rape,” climaxed with a scene as iconic as “the shower scene” in “Psycho,” and announced the first great female action heroine, in addition to launching a venerable franchise and many imitators.

It was the sort of movie that if you caught it in 70mm, immersed and overwhelmed by the dread and shock and sheer scale of the horror, you just had to round up friends and go back — just to see them jump out of their skin when a monster jumps out of John Hurt’s chest. God knows I did.

And it all began with a “Memory.”

“Memory: The Origins of ‘Alien'” is a deep-dive into the inspirations, history and production of this classic film. Directed by the fellow who gave us “The People vs. George Lucas” and “78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene,” it is broad, informative, opinionated and for the most part, rolls over the omissions and holes in its history.

Mostly, though, it is a celebration of screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, the quixotic writer behind the cult sci-fi comedy “Dark Star,” who went on to write “Blue Thunder” and adapt “Total Recall.”

O’Bannon, who died in 2009, is lauded by his widow and others from the production as the visionary who latched onto artist H.R. Giger to conceptualize both the alien and the film’s alien world and refused to let the movie be made without that visual input.

“Memory” was the title of a script fragment O’Bannon punched out in the early ’70s, thirty pages that became the opening scenes of “Alien.” But where did this story of reluctant “explorers” confronted with pitiless, murderous evil come from?

Alexandre O. Phillipe’s documentary opens in Delphi, Greece, with visions of the Greek Furies, toothy witches avenging and cleansing and prophesying doom.

Academics, fellow filmmakers, friends of O’Bannon and Diane O’Bannon talk about the comic books (“Death Rattle” among them) this was yanked from, the films (“It,” “The Thing!” “Planet of the Vampires,” “Queen of Blood”) that the screenwriter borrowed from in conjuring up this nightmare from the future.

Hanging over it all was the morbid, cerebral gloom and doom of novelist H. P. Lovecraft, whose “Necronomicon” became the common thread of connection among those developing the picture.

O’Bannon’s first connection to H.R. Giger is recalled, Giger’s own obsessions with ancient Egypt and mummies, and the early production history,  when director Walter Hill (“The Warriors,” “The Driver” and later “48 Hours” and “Deadwood”) and his production company tackled the project, is remembered.

Archival interviews with principals no longer with us — O’Bannon and Giger — and director Ridley Scott (whom Phillipe was not able to land) are cleverly projected onto video screens from the actual “Alien” set.

But Hill’s presence is sorely missed. He was not a star filmmaker at the time he left the film, but during his tenure on the project, sole survivor Ripley was changed from a man, in O’Bannon’s script, to a woman. That isn’t brought up, and Sigourney Weaver isn’t here either.

But we get on-set memories from Veronica Cartwright, tumbling over a settee when the “chest busting” scene begins, blasted by fake blood and offal when she stood back upright, and from Tom Skerritt, who played the captain of the Nostromo.

The Joseph Conrad connections — the ship and its shuttle (Narcissus) were named for vessels in Conrad novels — are laid out.

The era the film came out in, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, cynical and mistrusting, paranoid and feminist — is parked in the foreground. Ian Holm’s Ash character is dissected, a secret android who “must have been programmed by an awful AWFUL misogynist” given his computer-driven behavior.

Scott’s roving camera, the “slow motion…with the occasional stab” pacing, the novelty of those “perpetual motion” bobbing, drinking bird toys (scattered all over the ship), Cartwright’s description of the cavernous “vagina-shaped” pre-CGI sets, covered with “the sense of goo and grit and sweat and steam” that take us right back there, into that world of the movie’s creation.

It’s a real eye-opener, a film that connects with “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” the documentary about a film that was never made (which O’Bannon had attempted to script) and with all the science fiction cinema that “Alien” upended, and the way the cinematic universe has looked (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” anyone?) ever since.

Cast: Veronica Cartwright, Tom Skerritt, Roger Corman, Diane O’Bannon, Dan O’Bannon, H.R. Giger, Ridley Scott

Credits: Written and directed by Alexandre O. Philippe. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:35

Last year at this time, “Smallfoot” managed an $833,000 opening Thursday night on its way to a meek (for an animated musical) opening of $23 million or so,

Thursday night, “Abominable,” another “yeti” comedy but this time from Dreamworks, not Sony, did $650k Thursday, and Friday’s numbers were correspondingly weaker as well.

In other words, no big surprises from a picture that was projected top out at $20 million, and might be lucky to reach that.

It’s a Pearl Studios Chinese co-production.

Any criticism that it’s not really aimed at the US market (very Chinese, with Chinese geopolitics in the mix) might be worth noting, but the bigger message is “If somebody else is punching out an abominable snowman comedy, we should look at doing something else.”

Even Laika’s “Missing Link” covered similar ground.

“Downton Abbey” is still selling tickets in some quarters, with advance sales this weekend outstripping “Abominable,” according to my Tops in the Country Regal Cinemas home theater.

It might hit the mid to upper teens on its second weekend, but $14 seems to be its current track. It could be over $60 by midnight Sunday.

“Hustlers” is showing the legs of a movie phenom, which is one of the signs it could be a J. Lo Oscar contender. “Ad Astra” and “Rambo: Last Blood” opened last weekend, “Hustlers” a few weeks back.

The strippers get even dramedy will manage over $10 this weekend, Brad Pitt and Sly Stallone in the $8-9 range.

“Judy,” the Renee Zellweger Judy Garland biopic, is in a 461 screen limited release and is doing OK, nothing special (either as a movie, or a box office performer, although Zellweger is quite good). Over $1 million, less than $2.

The poet swordsman with big nose had to get his start somewhere.

This French backstage comedy tells that story.

The offstage moments are the glories of “Judy,” the places where Renée Zellweger truly inhabits the child star turned showbiz legend, a shell of her former self in the last year of her life. It’s all the stuff ON-stage that lets the picture down.

Zellweger and the script — based on a play by Peter Quilter — make Judy Garland a sad and lonely figure, not a tragic one. She is managing, rolling with the punches of an expensive divorce from Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell, playing a man exhausted by her), nearly broke and essentially homeless — if life in hotel suites, where sometimes she couldn’t pay the bills, counts as “homeless.” She is drinking, clinging to her lifelong, studio-mandated regimen of uppers and downers, regal, plucky and self-aware.

She knows she’s a star, a legend even. When she joins daughter Liza Minnelli (Gemma-Leah Devereux, with just the right spark) at an L.A. party, Liza wants to leave, Judy prefers to stay.

“You don’t know anybody here.”

“They seem to know me!”

And she can’t sleep. Ever.

Flashbacks take us to young Judy’s (Darci Shaw) “Over the Rainbow” breakthrough, where the “diet pills” and sleep deprivation began at the insistence of history’s worst stage mother (Natasha Powell) and on direct orders — always purred, rarely threatened — of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery).

“You’re my FAV-orite, Judy,” he says, noting that the “normal life” he hears in her longing for a regular meal, decent hours and the occasional nap is for other girls, all “prettier than you,” but destined for “small lives. Not Judy, She’s got “that VOICE.”

But “that voice” is unmistakable, big and deep and throaty, with the hint of an edge to the enunciations. Much of “Judy” takes place on the stage of London’s Talk of the Town supper showclub, with Zellweger singing the Garland standards — “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “The Trolly Song” and that one about the rainbow.

And Zellweger, an Oscar winner who masters the fidget, the crooked smile, the speaking voice — a posh affectation not-quite-smothering her Minnesota accent — and does her own singing, cannot make us forget Garland’s unique and iconic sound.

There’s no shame in not being able to replicate Judy Garland in song. Who could, other than Liza? But in recreating someone “you won’t forget,” this shortcoming — a hole in a perfectly servicable screen biography — “Judy” makes Garland sound forgettable.

The director of “True Story,” Rupert Goold, tracks us through Garland’s struggles leading up to and through her storied, and yes notorious final London club engagement.

Michael Gambon is the promoter/club owner who books her, Jesse Buckley plays the club factotum meant to be Judy’s “handler” for this version of “My Week With Marilyn.”

Garland is almost unfailingly polite, unless she’s drunk. Her stage fright, at 47, makes her a helpless and hopeless diva, somebody shoved in front of the microphone, shaken, from opening night onward. She’s worthy of our pity.

Perhaps there’s historical accuracy in the techty relationship between Rosalind Wilder (Buckley) and “the world’s greatest entertainer.” There’s nothing warm about it, either.

The younger man/entrepreneur (Finn Wittrock) Judy hooks up with at that L.A. party and later marries is also someone kept at arm’s length by the script. Was he another gay man, who were historically catnip to the Gumm, Garland and Minelli women?

The warmest scene has Judy connecting with two gay fans at the stage door, going to their place for scrambled eggs when there are no London restaurants open after midnight. That’s a play in itself, and if more of the movie had been this intimate, we’d already be stamping Zellweger’s name on the Oscar. It’s warm, musical (singing like Garland this late in her career is easier than it would have been at her “Star is Born” peak).

The flashbacks resonate, with Judy insecure about her looks, her weight, rejected by Mickey Rooney, hectered by her mother, kept in her place by the creep Mayer. And exhausted, always desperate for sleep.

But there’s no power to them.

Although Zellweger handles the few jokes well — a doctor asks, “Take anything for depression?” “Four HUSBANDS!” — there aren’t enough to make this rather somber picture achieve joy. Only in the finale do we have a bittersweet taste of that.

Despite a good cast and a scattering of big names in it, “Judy” feels malnourished, as if Zellweger’s reduced box office status wasn’t able to attract a more flamboyant Mayer, more charismatic players surrounding her.

If we remember Garland, and she is fading even as a gay icon, it will be due to that voice, those films, the glorious bits of camp and “Show must go on” pluck that you can find in scores of Youtube videos of her TV appearances and the occasional concert.

On a musical bio-pic scale, this isn’t “Rocketman” or “Bohemian Rhapsody,” not “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “What’s Love Got to Do With It,” “Sweet Dreams” or “Get on Up.” It’s unfortunately a lot closer to “Jimi: All is By My Side.” Uncanny in its impersonation, flat as a movie, forgettable as a biography.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for substance abuse, thematic content, some strong language, and smoking

Cast: Renée Zellweger, Jesse Buckley, Rufus Sewell, Darci Shaw, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon

Credits: Directed by Rupert Goold, script by Tom Edge, based on a play by Peter Quilter. An LD Entertainment/BBC Films/Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:58

Just caught this trailer in a theater and boy, does it have my interest.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Leslie Mann and Cherry Jones also star in this Nov. 1. noir about a detective with Tourettes, based on a Jonathan Lethem novel.

Third trailer, a spy becomes a bird comedy. Buying in?

Take your kids to “Abominable” and tell me I’m wrong. It plays like an animated dramedy made for the Chinese market.

It’s laugh-starved and China-flattering in the extreme. The villains are a Brit (Eddie Izzard) and his North American hireling (Sarah Paulson).

You could not kiss up more to the one-party state without starting the story in Hong Kong, criticizing pro-democracy protestors.

It’s the over-familiarity of the visuals — not the Chinese settings, but the Yeti/Bigfoot/”Missing Link” focus — that might have parents and kids thinking “Meh, seen it” in North America and the West.

Can Dreamworks be happy with the $20 million projections facing one of their animated blockbusters as it hits screens? A $35 million take is poor, by their standards. Pixar and Disney Feature Animation releases routinely open in the $60 range.

Reviews aren’t helping.

Now, $20 seems like a lowballing prediction from a marketing department looking to create the perception of a winner when it does $30, but the picture’s been labeled a loser before it steps into the animated kiddie entertainment void.

“Downtown Abbey” could still have some pent-up demand, but will the older audience showing up for that want to see it again? A $17 million second weekend take seems low to me, but BoxOfficeMojo sayeth so.

“Rambo” and “Ad Astra” are set to fall WAY off, both are projected to his $8.5-9 this weekend. I wouldn’t be shocked if they plummeted. The movies are a dog and a very well groomed dog, respectively.

“It Chapter 2” has been falling off steeper than expected, but should still edge them.

“Judy” is opening on 461 screens, a potential Oscar contender from a studio that doesn’t know how to manufacture that outcome. It’s opening a bit early to set itself up as a front-runner, but platforming it may be the smart play.

A $1.4 million weekend is projected.

We can safely assume, from the way Dick Long’s two cover-bandmates dump him in the emergency room parking lot, that the night got plumb out of hand.

We saw the “Pink Freud” band rehearsal earlier, the booze and weed and pranks that followed.

And of course we’ve noticed the film’s title, “The Death of Dick Long.” This story isn’t going to end well for old Dick.

But nothing, no urban legends about the rural South spread in the contemptuous North, no Alabama jokes, can prepare us for what put Dick Long there.

This is no “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil” remimagined as “Tucker & Dale ARE Evil.” It’s dark, and rarely what anybody could call “darkly funny.” It’s a redneck noir thriller, mostly concerned with incompetent criminals involved in a cover-up, and obese, slothful cops “waitin’ for sometin’ that just falls into our laps” to put it all together.

But if it’s not funny, when it could have been, not the thriller it wants to be and and not particularly satisfying in either case, “The Death of Dick Long” still manages to be suspenseful, a rare outing in that subgenre of Southern Fried Film Noir we call “Cracker Gothic.”

Michael Abbott is Zeke and Andre Hyland is Earl, tone-deaf beer-drinkers who’ve been playing together forever, probably never in public. And when the third member of their Power Trio winds up bleeding out in the back of Zeke’s Taurus wagon, they’ve got a choice to make — together.

“Are you gonna help me, or you want to go to jail?”

They’ve got to keep Zeke’s wife (Virginia Newcomb) in the dark. They’ve got to get Zeke’s chatty pre-tween (Poppy Cunningham) to school, without her seeing the stains in the back seat or the blood that’s gotten on her favorite jumper when Daddy “Never Learned to do the Laundry” makes a hash of things.

Earl shows off his poker face when his flirty trailer park neighbor (Sunita Mani) asks him a dozen innocent questions about what he’s loading all this junk into his pick-em up truck for, where he’s headed and who he is going with.

“What’d y’all do, knock over a bank?”

Dick’s wife (Jess Weixler of “It Chapter 2”) is wondering where her man is, if he’s out cheating.

The doddering sheriff (Janelle Cochrane) should be no cause for concern. She’s got a cane and little in the way of urgency of Margo from “Fargo” (the movie, of course) crime-solving skills. Her indolent, convenience-store donuts-loving deputies include a younger version of her (Sarah Baker), new to the force, anxious to get home to a quiche which “the missus” has whipped up.

Probably the wrong person to joke to about how “gay” the station wagon, which Zeke reports stolen, made him feel while driving.

“I guess we didn’t totally think that through.”

That kind of goes for the movie, unfortunately. The suspense that builds as our idiot criminals try to fiigure out how long they can elude our idiot cops works.

The big twist in the crime is head-snapping.

But there’s a sense that the mere creation of the characters, the setting and the crime is enough to get audiences to laugh. Maybe there’ll be some of that, in cities far removed from the South. It’s so half-assed nobody familiar with the region will giggle, or even grimace.

And the third act is borderline catostrophic, with an ending that feels neither natural nor earned.

The women are the red letter performers here, with Newcomb (“Jumanji”) showing Lydia, her character’s fire and fury, veteran character actress Baker playing up the slow-at-math but able to put two and two together Officer Dudley and Weixler bringing pathos to a woman who doesn’t know where her husband, Dick Long, is.

And might not want to know, when push comes to shove.

But there’s more to a dark comedy than a really dark crime, more to a thriller than a slo-motion pursuit and more to the rural South than arch, slow redneck stereotypes.

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, disturbing sexual material, and brief drug use

Cast: Michael Abbott Jr., Virginia Newcomb, Andre Hyland, Jess Weixler, Sarah Baker, Janelle Cochrane and Roy Wood, Jr.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Scheinert, script by Billy Chew.  An A24 release.

Running time: 1:40