Chances are if you’ve heard the name Ben Wheatley, it’s because he last directed “Kill List,” an indescribable mash-up of horror, crime and kitchen sink English drama, with an unmistakably macabre sense of humor — even when one already battered character’s head is repeatedly pounded with a hammer. His latest, “Sightseers,” is a bit nicer, in that it’s an English camping comedy about a couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram) who occasionally murder strangers for no reason.

“I think they were worried I was going to make ‘Kill List 2,’” Wheatley recalls, of a project which existed before he came aboard. He points out he has a history in comedy, on television and in viral videos. “I know how to structure a gag. Comedy’s like a flame that you have to feed with fuel. If it dies it’s very hard to get back. After the hammer scene in ‘Kill List,’ I thought no one would ever laugh again.”

Doing a film with comparatively minor head trauma — although there is some — was a relief after making what he describes as “a really horrible horror film,” at least in the sense of its increasing bleakness, and his having to talk about it at length while promoting it. “I made that film and it made people really unhappy.

“I thought it would be nice if they came out having a laugh and were cheered by something I made,” he says. “It’s not the happiest comedy, ‘Sightseers,’ but it’s a step in the right direction.”

“Sightseers” swings back and forth between comedy — both Lowe and Oram, who wrote the script together, have a deep history in British comedy — and horrible gore, as when one pesky rambler’s face is smashed in. “It’s got a lot in common with [Paul] Verhoeven and ‘[Monty] Python’ stuff,” according to him. “[Terry] Gilliam does that often, going from stuff that’s really horrible to stuff that’s funny and satirical, then back to horror. You feel like you’re being pulled and pushed around. I like that feeling.”

Although he offers that the comedy and horror can become one. In “Sightseers,” the victims are often thoroughly nice. He says, “The more innocent the victim, the funnier it is.”

Wheatley also offers up a theory that comics can, sometimes at least, make better dramatic actors than serious thespians. “The difference between a comedian and an actor is a comedian has the life experience of stand-up comedy. They’ve died in front of audiences a lot. They know what sadness is — for f—ing real. And it’s their own material they’ve died with. That is more personal than being in a play that’s s—.”

It ties into his view on humanity. “I think people are funny, generally,” he states. “Everyone has a sense of humor. They certainly have a sense of humor when things are going wrong. When you make films that are very po-faced, where no one has a laugh, they don’t seem real. People aren’t like that. People aren’t stern and miserablist all the time.”

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‘Stories We Tell’
Director: Sarah Polley
Genre: Documentary
Rating: PG-13
3 (out of 5) Globes

Sarah Polley’s family documentary “Stories We Tell” begins by invoking the central issue of historiography: How do we mine absolute truth from chaos? Can we trust the word of people, who often misremember or baldly misrepresent events? Perhaps more importantly, for viewers who are not part of the Polley clan: Is every personal story interesting to a third party? There eventually emerges a genuinely interesting twist in Polley’s personal life, which at first seems mundane and ordinary. Oddly, it’s the mundane material that proves more interesting, more cosmic than the stranger-than-fiction material that comes later.

Here’s the not-quite-spoiler (which arrives around the half hour mark): Polley, a child actress turned adult actress turned filmmaker, grew up thinking that her dad was her mother’s husband, Michael. In fact, her biological father was Harry Guelkin, a film producer with whom her mother, Diane, had a brief affair. Polley was not made aware of this until well into adulthood, and Guelkin spent nearly three decades without contacting his daughter.

This barnburner eventually takes up the majority of Polley’s film, and it’s interesting watching her and her family forced to walk a fine line and not upset the man who raised her. Everyone, including many siblings and half-siblings from her mother’s previous marriage, is extremely nice and doesn’t wish to pile more despair upon the already melancholic Michael, who became a widower when his wife succumbed to cancer.

But “Stories We Tell” is, oddly, more profound when it’s not about shocking skeletons in closets, but about something comparatively quotidian. The quiet and sometimes remote Michael, a (we’re told) promising writer, wooed Diane, a sparkplug and extrovert, who was attracted to his brain and potential. But Michael winds up putting his ambitions on hold for family life, and for insecurity issues known only to him. Not unlike Michael Apted’s “Up” documentary series, it’s a portrait of everyday disappointment, a reminder how most of us so easily abandon our dreams due to little more than just life.

This is not a depressing film — it’s a lively one, sprightly and playful, with constant cuts to staged Super 8-style recreations of scenes that were never filmed, but live on in a collective memory like ghosts. Polley’s fiction films (“Away From Her,” “Take This Waltz”) are heavy, if also often perceptive. It’s clear from “Stories We Tell” that she’s at her best when she doesn’t look like she’s trying.

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According to Indiewire, this weekend’s art house box office winner was “Mud,” starring Matthew McConaughey, which netted $2,185,980 (or thereabouts) on 363 screens, averaging $6,022. That’s far from the highest per screen average: lots of people saw the Norwegian Oscar-nominee “Kon-Tiki,” which netted $22,334 on only two screens.

Somewhat surprising is that recent events didn’t keep people away from “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” Mira Nair’s hot-button account of a Pakistani social climber (Riz Ahmed) who is at least moderately radicalized through racial profiling after the events of September 11. That nabbed $32,700 from 3 screens, for a $10,900 per screen average.

Elsewhere, “Midnight’s Children,” based on Salman Rushdie 1983 breakthrough novel and adapted by the author himself, did okay an $12,200 on two screens. As did Terence Nance’s hyped experimental film “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” which only did $11,100 on two screens. (Ed. That number should be higher. It’s an excellent film. Try harder, moviegoers.)

The big news is the severely underperforming “At Any Price,” from “Man Push Cart” and “Goodbye Solo” director Ramin Bahrani. Despite a name cast (Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron) and some good reviews (largely surrounding Quaid’s performance), it only made $16,574 on 4 screens, for a meh $4,144 per screen average.

See Indiewire’s report for more details. And please read our reviews of “Mud,” “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” “Midnight’s Children,” “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty” and “At Any Price.”

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‘The Angels’ Share’
Director: Ken Loach
Stars: Paul Brannigan, John Henshaw
Rating: NR
3 (out of 5) globes

The British filmmaker Ken Loach (“My Name is Joe,” “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”) is a prolific and committed chronicler of the working class; his public statement on the recent passing of Margaret Thatcher was not one of the kind ones. Nevertheless, every two or three of his many films tends to be a goofy, rollicking comedy. “Looking for Eric” even rehashed “Play It Again Sam” with a postman and his imaginary friend, real-life footballer Eric Cantona (as himself). But there’s always, always a point when the fun stops dead in its tracks, with grim reality, even tragedy, abruptly stepping back in as a severe buzzkill.

“The Angels’ Share,” the most recent film by Loach (and screenwriter Paul Laverty), improbably inverts this schematic: It’s a grim, depressing drama suddenly redeemed, if you will, by an affably inane Hollywood heist plot. Another charismatic Loach find, newcomer Paul Brannigan plays a young hothead with a history of violence so deep and scary he’s barred from his own son’s birth. Finally looking to turn his life around, he discovers that he has an innately strong nose for whiskey, around the same time he learns a cask of the world’s rarest whiskey, a batch “beyond price,” is about to auctioned off. Could he and a few of his wacky community-service buds perhaps siphon some off and sell it to the highest bidder?

What starts off as intense, even for Loach — a flashback shows our coked-up hero beating a poor guy nearly to death — eventually turns into the type of film that plays The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles),” twice. Granted, that’s Loach’s biggest concession to the popcorn crowd. Even as this turns into a low-rent “Ocean’s Eleven,” crossed with a slobs versus snobs comedy — in which lower class Glaswegians with accents so thick they require subtitles invade the prim world of booze connoisseurs — Loach and Laverty keep one foot in downer reality. Even a hilariously offhand screw-up in their plan produces a stretch of very real and very unpleasant shouting. Other, more broad jokes play straight, as when one thirsty guy farts before downing a spit jar that’s also filled with puke. Is it a film that subverts the “Full Monty” feel-good template or succumbs to it? Either way, and as ever, it’s just good that a guy as serious as Loach has a huge sense of humor.

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A film installation celebrating the words of Nelson Mandela, the former South African president, is taking over many of the electronic billboards of New York’s Times Square for a few minutes every night for the month of April.

The short film was commissioned by the Tribeca Film Institute, an arts organization co-founded by actor Robert De Niro. It is being played shortly before midnight across many of Times Square’s glowing screens for the rest of the month.

“We’re in the crossroads of the world, it’s all about the glitz and the glamour, and all of a sudden you’re seeing this man to remind us of our humanity,” Ndaba Mandela, a 30-year-old grandson of the anti-apartheid leader, said at a special screening of the film on Friday night.

De Niro also attended the event at a Times Square hotel and posed for pictures with Ndaba and Kweku Mandela, another grandson, but did not make any remarks.

The two grandsons worked with filmmakers Nabil Elderkin, Andrew van der Westhuyzen and Gregory Stern to choose inspiring quotes from Nelson Mandela’s speeches to honor his 95th birthday in July.

Mandela spent 27 years on Robben Island and in other jails as a result of his struggle to end apartheid in South Africa before becoming the country’s first black president in 1994.

His words have been animated to dance across screens that normally advertise clothing, movies and corporations. About a dozen electronic billboards, including one on Thomson Reuters’ Times Square building, are participating, organizers said.

Mandela, who stepped down from office in 1999, has had health problems recently and spent more than a week in the hospital with pneumonia this month.

“He’s doing much better,” Ndaba Mandela, who said he lived with his grandfather in Johannesburg, said in an interview. “I would say he is about 80 percent.”

He added that his grandfather had offered his approval upon learning that his words would be projected in Times Square. “If he doesn’t support something, he’ll let you know,” Mandela said.

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‘In the House’
Director: Francois Ozon
Stars: Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer
Rating: R
3 (out of 5) globes

Once upon a time, Francois Ozon ruled the art house. A self-styled enfant terrible of French and international cinema, he made maddeningly elusive art films (“See the Sea”), tackled unfilmed scripts by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (“Water Drops on Burning Rocks”) and gained the trust of aging matrons like Charlotte Rampling (“Under the Sand,” “Swimming Pool”) and Catherine Deneuve et al (“8 Women”). But “enfants” grow up — or at least their audiences do. Ozon’s work in the last decade hasn’t attracted nearly the attention it did previously, and Ozon’s career is the type where every new film is dubbed a comeback, even if it’s just another perfectly adequate addition to an oeuvre that will look impressive in retrospect.

Ozon’s latest “comeback” — after 2010’s well-liked “Potiche” — is his most overtly playful since his heyday. Fabrice Luchini plays a high school lit and composition teacher bored with his career and bored with his pupils. Upon discovering that one of them, the remote Claude (Ernst Umhauer), is actually a promising man of letters, he latches onto him and gives him an assignment: worm his way into the lives of a jock and his parents to see what constitutes the “perfect” family. (That the “perfect mom” is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, aka Mrs. Roman Polanski, is one of the film’s better jokes.) Claude’s reports on his findings, with him uncovering not a few sneaky transgressions, turn into serials, which Germane reads with the lip-smacking expectation of a stay-at-home parent watching his “stories.” But is Claude making it up?

If “In the House” is a return to form — and it’s worth noting that 2007’s “Angel,” which went unaccountably straight to video in the U.S., is rather excellent — it’s a reminder that said form was rarely much more than pleasant, and often self-satisfied to a fault. Like much Ozon, “House” rides out an amusing premise without deviating much from the course. Once you get what Claude, and the film, is doing — which holds back considerably more than his other, nastier suburban assault, 1998’s “Sitcom” —there’s not much to expect beyond predictably “unpredictable” twists. Also like past Ozons, there’s always the acting, never not lovely, with a never-better Luchini paired nicely with an inevitably Kristin Scott Thomas-y Kristin Scott Thomas as his contemporary art gallery-running wife. (Cue easy jokes about contemporary art.) That Ozon is actually hugely compassionate towards his suburban targets, moreso than those intruding upon them, is both good and less good.

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‘Blancanieves’
Director: Pablo Berger
Stars: Sofia Oria, Maribel Verdu
Rating: PG-13
2  (out of 5) globes

Before “The Artist,” faux-silent cinema had one regular practitioner: Guy Maddin, the Canadian mad scientist who — with “The Heart of the World” and “Cowards Bend the Knee” — always kept cult viewers fat on spastic homages to Soviet montage and German mountain films. Pablo Berger’s “Blancanieves” was in production at the same time as “The Artist.” Though it won many awards in its native Spain, there’s not a chance any producer would have successfully rammed this down Oscar voter throats. But it’s closer to the Best Picture winner than to a Maddin whatzit, which is to say it’s a reminder that not all of the period’s entries, as with any era, were winners.

That’s not for lack of trying. Berger’s film cites the Grimms’ “Snow White” as its source, but it tries its best to cover those tracks. It takes 55 minutes for Snow stand-in Carmencita (Sofia Oria as an adult) to almost get gouged by an assassin and happen upon a septet of dwarves (one a transvestite, natch). Before then our heroine’s backstory is relentlessly upchucked. The daughter of a famed bullfighter, she’s placed in the care of a duplicitous nurse (Maribel Verdu, of “Y Tu Mama Tambien), who proves — like Julia Roberts in “Mirror Mirror” and Charlize Theron in “Snow White and the Huntsman” — to be the aging-but-still-hotcha queen.

Upon escaping her clutches, Carmencita finds herself adopting her father’s trade. That Snow White now has a job, and a pretty manly job, makes it less sexist than the Grimms original (as well as the other recent Snow White “twists”). It grants autonomy to a character who is typically reliant on men at all turns. And Oria does a mighty bullfighter strut that’s right for the hyperbole of silent cinema.

The same goes for Verdu, who vamps up a storm. Someone has to. For a film that rounds up the Brothers Grimm, bullfighting, dwarves and a nearly century-old filmmaking style, “Blancanieves” is surprisingly sedate, calmly plowing through its mixed-up narrative. One could say that’s accurate, that silents aren’t as hysterical as legend would have them. (Some of the period’s best, Mary Pickford and Buster Keaton among them, relied on the subtlest of physical expressions.) But if ever there was material that cried out for the era’s more kinetic techniques — if not an outright debasement, a la Guy Maddin — it’s a fractured fairy tale that upends gender roles.

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“Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic” premieres May 31 on Showtime.
Credit: Showtime

These new films are definitely a laughing matter.

“Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic”
Pryor was said to have broken the glass ceiling for black comedians, with that trademark tell-it-straight style that touched on the taboo and won fans of all races. Showtime traces the star’s rise to success and the many hiccups that came along the way, from the early Vegas gig he blew to his penchant for freebasing cocaine, which ultimately led to a suicide attempt. With commentary from other comedians like Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, George Lopez, and Dave Chappelle, plus stories from those closest to Pryor, like his managers and ex-girlfriends, the doc provides an in-depth look at the man behind the laughs. When you hear about his decision to get away from the Hollywood scene and head to Africa, suddenly, Dave Chappelle’s meltdown makes a little more sense.

“Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me”
The Broadway veteran speaks candidly from her corner suite at the Carlyle Hotel on her career in theater and on “30 Rock,” plus her battles with aging, diabetes and alcoholism. First-time documentary director Chiemi Karasawa was inspired to focus on Stritch after spotting her at the salon. The resulting piece is a mix of interviews with Stritch and her contemporaries like Nathan Lane, Tina Fey and James Gandolfini, plus a look at her day-to-day as a working octogenarian also maintaining her sobriety. Stritch was filmed for a year and a half, during which she and Karasawa would watch her old movies together and talk about everything from Broadway to her dates with John F. Kennedy (for whom she wouldn’t give up her virginity, she divulges in the film). From the sweet old lady singing show tunes in the elevator to the feisty woman telling a swerving cyclist or cabbie “Easy, you son of a bitch!” Stritch’s own character is just as intriguing as those she’s portrayed on the stage and screen.

“I Got Somethin’ to Tell You”
A Kickstarter campaign provided the necessary funding Whoopi Goldberg needed for her directorial debut, a documentary about the trailblazing comedian Moms Mabley. Moms, with her signature crackly voice, mismatched clothes and hunched-over stance, is remembered on-screen through clips, photos and interviews Whoopi conducted with other comedians, like Kathy Griffin, Bill Cosby and Arsenio Hall. She was revered for her ability to appeal to a wide variety of audiences (black, white, male, female) during a politically poignant time in our nation’s history, the Civil Rights Movement. “Without Moms, there certainly would not have been a Whoopi,” Goldberg wrote on her Kickstarter page.

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‘Oblivion’
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Stars: Tom Cruise, Olga Kurylenko
Rating: PG-13
3 (out of 5) globes

It’s not clear when sci-fi and comics culture — once solely the realm of nerds — became the dominant pop culture product. Real fans can take solace that most of these products emphasize two things about which they could (hopefully) care less: mindless spectacle and emotion. The mega-budgeted “Oblivion,” starring plucky comeback kid Tom Cruise, holds our hands as it guides us through a twisty, almost hard sci-fi premise concerning a post-apocalyptic Earth. And like “Inception,” it ultimately wants to appeal to touchy feelings, not sterling brain power. It’s also sometimes rather dumb.

“Oblivion” is the kind of sci-fi that opens with an amusingly protracted opening narration. Cruise is a mysterious worker mysteriously working on a mysterious project reaping what resources remain from the now-barren Earth. (Cue shots of a collapsed Pentagon and the Washington Monument leaning over a miserable moat. The latter also took a beating in another recent blockbuster featuring Melissa Leo, “Olympus Has Fallen.”) Cruise admits that he’s had his mind wiped, but he has stray memories of hanging atop the Empire State Building with a woman played by Olga Kurylenko, which are, alas, not outtakes from “To the Wonder.”

There are revelations en route, none of them worth spoiling, involving the true nature of Cruise’s superiors (embodied by Oscar winner Leo, seen entirely on an unaccountably discombobulating scene that makes her look like Max Headroom). There’s also the issue of a group of leftover humans skulking about in caves, led by a cigar-chomping Morgan Freeman (in a glorified cameo). And are we sure we know much about this Cruise fella? Even playing a cipher in a far-flung future, Cruise plays the classic Cruise rebel: a cocky smart aleck who takes risks but remains consummately serious when need be, much to the consternation of his rational killjoy co-worker/hottie ladyfriend (Andrea Riseborough).

What follows is not exactly original, and it calls to mind films one wouldn’t want to recall. The armed-to-the-teeth, probably not-so-good drones (insert topical joke here) resemble the boxy floating robots from “The Black Hole.” Meanwhile one plot point is that the moon has been destroyed —wasn’t that the Deceptacons’ plot in the second “Transformers”? Director Joseph Kosinski (“Tron: Legacy”) is a clean and patient director, a perfect fit for a film in non-3-D IMAX and for a screenplay that takes its time in laying out its game plan, wisely recognizing that the journey is superior to the far-too-pat destination.

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‘Upstream Color’
Director: Shane Carruth
Stars: Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth
Rating: NR
5 (out of 5) Globes

However dense Shane Carruth’s 2004 time travel romp “Primer” was — which is to say, to put it kindly, absurdly — one could at least offer a basic summary: Two guys accidentally invent a time machine and things get out of control. No such luck with “Upstream Color,” Carruth’s belated follow-up, which is even more complicated but without the safety net of a genre standby premise. To wit: It involves a woman (Amy Seimetz, a filmmaker-actor as well) who, as the picture begins, is abducted and brainwashed. There is something involving inchworms distilled into tea. She eventually meets a man (Carruth) who appears to have experienced a similar, or maybe the exact same, event. They enter into a kind of relationship comprised of inscrutable rituals and the search for truth, whatever that may be, and which may involve a farmer who raises pigs and performs ambient music.

The Internet’s dedicated obsessive time-wasters solved “Primer,” and they’re doubtless all over “Upstream,” which makes even less sense. But treating either film as a puzzle is to miss its true essence. One doesn’t need to have a firm grasp on the multiple timelines in “Primer” to grok its portrayal of new science gone madly off the rails; nor does one need to understand what skin grafts on pigs have to do with anything in “Upstream Color” to get something profound out of its portrayal of love borne out of shared trauma. The characters played by Seimetz and Carruth have had their lives upturned by a severe disturbance, and once they meet, they block out the world that does not share their past, descending into a conjoined insanity that makes sense to them, if not anyone else.

For the record, the plot makes a sort of sense as it’s in motion. No filmmaker this heavily into plot has been this disinterested in expository dialogue; “Primer” drowned in technical gobbledygook, while the chatter here is usually off-hand and barely coherent when audible. It’s clear Carruth intends this as an emotional experience, a delving into real pain experienced by 30-somethings who have yet to find stability. He composes the film like music, in movements. There are few “proper” scenes, but plenty of montages, and the final third is a dialogue-free affair that rides on semi-sensible imagery against Carruth’s mournful score. While it’s happening in front of you, it’s the most arresting film in town. Just don’t try to explain it to strangers.

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“The Company You Keep,” the ninth film Robert Redford has directed — and only the third he has starred in as well — concerns former members of the Weather Underground, the militant and sometimes violent anti-Vietnam War organization. A longtime Hollywood liberal, Redford has spoken of the film’s political nature elsewhere. But on Thursday, he discussed its other aspects.

“If you had to break it down in terms of which [theme] is more important, the one for my character is obvious: the love of his daughter,” he explains. When the feds start rounding up ex-members responsible for a violent bank robbery, Redford’s character, who’s innocent of those charges, goes on the lam to clear his name. “What happens when you’re passionate and totally committed to something in your youth, and then that evaporates? You grow out of that position and you’re still stuck because of the trap you created for yourself when you were young. What is the cost of that? [The film is] not about that event that took place in 1970. That’s the kickoff. It’s about their lives right now.”

When journalists talk to Redford, inevitably “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film about the revelation of Watergate, comes up. “That was not about Watergate. That was not about President Nixon,” he maintains. “It was about those two guys and the work that they did. I wanted to put a put a light on something I didn’t think many people knew about, which is: How do journalists work? How do they get a story?”

The film’s portrait of journalism doesn’t quite hold up today. “[Journalism has] changed so drastically, because of the democratization of information. Anyone can put something up. So now it’s harder and harder to find what the truth is,” he says, pointing out that there’s less regulation of the press than then. “The rules that governed journalism when I was younger said you had to get two people to go on record before you could quote a source. That’s gone. What took it away was the need to compete. You had to scoop. Sometimes you couldn’t wait around to do the ethical thing. You had to jump to get ahead of the next guy. It makes Watergate look like a piece of history. It can’t come back.”

Also inevitably, talking to Redford means trying to get scoops on his recent casting in the “Captain America” sequel. He announces, as has elsewhere, that he’s the head of S.H.I.E.L.D., and that he took the job only because he “wanted to do something different.”

He’s more apt to talk about “All Is Lost,” about a man trying to survive a giant storm in the Indian Ocean. That one is genuinely different: He’s the only star and there’s no dialogue. “It was really grueling. It was really hard, tough, physically challenging. But I really enjoyed it because I was putting myself out there.”

When asked if it’s akin to “The Old Man and the Sea,” he laughs. “No, this is much more active. MUCH more active.”

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‘Starbuck’
Director: Ken Scott
Stars: Patrick Huard, Julie LeBreton, Antoine Betrand
Rating: R
3 Globes

It is absolutely overstating it to say that this Canadian comedy about a beleaguered sperm donor is the “feel good” film of the year. But it is no exaggeration to say that this French-language import is closer in tone to the touching “The Kids are All Right” than it is to Jay Chandrasekhar’s crude farce “The Babymakers.” “Starbuck” is the pseudonym David (Patrick Huard) used when he earned considerable money — for a good cause — by making deposits to a cryobank years ago. But currently, there is a situation stemming from all of the sperm he donated: Of the 533 children David “fathered,” 142 of them have launched a class action lawsuit asking him to reveal his identity.

Yet David is reluctant to expose himself, especially given the backlash attitudes expressed by friends, family members, the media and even perfect strangers regarding his activities. Much of “Starbuck” concerns this not-quite-lovable loser trying to secretly meet the kids he spawned. Wisely, the film’s gentle humor stems less from the comic potential of David meddling in his kids’ lives and more from folks like his best friend and father of four (Antoine Bertrand) advising him never to reproduce. Of course, David’s girlfriend Valerie (Julie LeBreton) is pregnant and pressuring him to man up and show he has what it takes to be a dad.

If “Starbuck” has a far-fetched comic premise, it succeeds because Patrick Huard is amusing in the title role. He generates many smiles with his hangdog expressions, exaggerated body language, and deft comic timing — just marvel as he pulls a ticket off a windshield with his teeth. David grows up because he suddenly feels responsibility to others, and Huard makes his journey both credible and satisfying. Even if “Starbuck” is contrived, it is never tasteless. May the American remake — with Vince Vaughn and Chris Pratt, due later this year — be so refined.

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Not everyone is excited that “The Amazing Spider-Man 2″ will be the biggest movie filmed yet in New York.

Williamsburg residents are asking the filmmakers to skip shooting in the neighborhood during the upcoming Passover holiday.

Councilman Stephen Levin said on Friday that the production “would be a plague on the streets of South Williamsburg during this sacred holiday.”

The filming would create a parking fiasco of “biblical proportions,” he added.

The mayor’s office cautioned that no permits have been issued yet.

“Every consideration is taken by our office to accommodate residents observing religious holidays,” said Marybeth Ihle, spokeswoman for the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

Julie Kuehndorf, a publicist for the film, added that the studio is working with residents and the mayor’s office to “minimize any impact on the community.”

“We’re doing our best to be good neighbors,” she said.

According to Levin’s office, production would block parking between March 22 and March 27 around the Marcy Avenue Armory, where they are scheduled to film.

Residents will not be able to move their cars ahead of time because of Passover restrictions on driving, Levin said.

“’Spider-Man’ is spinning a web of problems for the community,” Levin said. “With great power there must also come great responsibility — Columbia Pictures should live by the motto that led Spider-Man to use his abilities to fight crime and respect the observance of Passover by moving up their shooting.”

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Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace star in “Dead Man Down.”
Credit: John Baer

There are those who pick apart logic in movies, criticizing plot developments for not making real-world sense. There are also those who feel this is pointless, as one shouldn’t let outlandish, even impossible occurrences in a piece of fiction stand in the way of one’s enjoyment. Even “Vertigo” — the Greatest Film Ever Made, as per the most recent Sight & Sound poll — makes very little rational sense. But where does one draw the line? Perhaps around J.H. Wyman’s script for “Dead Man Down,” whose title isn’t even a saying.

Colin Farrell plays a hoodlum for a big NYC crime boss (Terrence Howard), who’s been fending off a mystery adversary. It turns out the adversary is Farrell himself, whose wife and daughter were murdered by Howard’s goons. Farrell has thus become a superhuman avenger, much like Gerard Butler in another absurdly ludicrous script, “Law Abiding Citizen.”

Alas, Farrell’s neighbor across the way (Noomi Rapace) knows his secret — he killed someone without drawing the blinds, wouldn’t you know — and instead of turning him in, blackmails him into murdering the drunk driver who left the left side of her face scarred. But will they, you know, fall in love?

“Dead Man Down” marks the Hollywood debut of director Nils Arden Oplev, who helmed the Swedish original of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” This time, Rapace doesn’t get a quality role as she did with Lisbeth Salander. Rapace’s character, a beautician rather than a pierced hacker, is scattershot and basically unplayable, though Rapace attacks it with a loopy commitment that becomes oddly affable. Her director gets the same deal: This is one dumb movie, but Oplev — whose “Tattoo” was a funereal slog — plays it as weird and lurid as possible. Rapace lives with her mom, played by (why not?) Isabelle Huppert, who seems convinced she’s in a silly movie where she prances about and makes cookies. This is the most inappropriate role the French ice queen has had since playing Steve Guttenberg’s affairee in “The Bedroom Window,” but her periodic appearances add a richer texture to a movie that would otherwise only be pretty stupid.

‘Dead Man Down’
Director: Nils Arden Oplev
Stars: Colin Farrell, Noomi Rapace
Rating: R
Grade: ➊➋

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“Jack the Giant Slayer,” the first big-budget action film of the year, was anything but a killer at the weekend box office.

“Jack,” a retelling of the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale, earned the No. 1 spot on domestic box office charts with $28 million in ticket sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to studio estimates compiled by Reuters on Sunday. But that was an underwhelming start for a 3D movie that cost $189 million to produce, plus tens of millions more to market.

“Jack the Giant Slayer” also grossed $13.7 million from 1,824 screens in 10 Asian markets.

Comedy “Identity Thief” took in $9.7 million to capture second place and new adult comedy “21 and Over” finished in third place on domestic charts with $9 million in ticket sales from Friday through Sunday.

Low-budget horror sequel “The Last Exorcism Part II” took the No. 4 slot with $8 million, according to studio estimates.

“Jack” clearly was not a great opening by any means, said Phil Contrino, vice president/chief analyst with Boxoffice.com.

“But I wouldn’t rush to call the film a financial flop just yet because overseas growth can really save a movie, and I feel that this is a movie that could do really well in other territories and make up for the fact that the North American haul was a little bit underwhelming.”

The movie stars Nicholas Hoult as a young farmer who ventures into the land of the giants to save a kidnapped princess. The film received a mixed reception from critics. As of Friday, 49 percent of reviews recommended the movie on aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.

Warner Bros. believes “Jack” will perform well in overseas markets as it opens in more countries in the coming weeks. International sales, particularly for action movies, can run twice as high or more.

“It was within the range of our expectations,” Jeff Goldstein, vice president theatrical distributions at Warner Bros., said about the film’s domestic weekend performance.

“We know that this is a global picture and the technology and the special effects will really drive this movie internationally,” he added.

“Jack the Giant Slayer” was produced by Time Warner Inc-owned Warner Brothers and Legendary Entertainment, which partnered with Warner on hits including “The Dark Knight” trilogy and “The Hangover” series.

Two of last year’s films with bigger budgets flopped – Walt Disney Co’s $250 million Mars epic “John Carter” and the $209 million action movie “Battleship” from Comcast Corp’s Universal Pictures – forcing the companies to acknowledge financial losses.

“John Carter,” released in March last year, opened with $30.2 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Tony Wible, who compiles a database to project film performance, had estimated “Jack” would need to open with at least $25 million at U.S. and Canadian theaters to make back its budget, not including marketing costs.

“21 and Over,” produced for $13 million, is a college party comedy about three friends who celebrate a 21st birthday on the night before a big exam. It was written by the screenwriters of “The Hangover.”

The “Last Exorcism” sequel follows the 2010 original about a minister who lets his demon-fighting be filmed by a documentary crew. In the new movie, the story resumes with the girl who was previously freed from an evil force running into more trouble. Distributor CBS Films, a unit of CBS Corp, acquired the sequel for about $3 million.

Rounding out the top five films was “Snitch,” which brought in $7.7 million.

Another new release, “Phantom,” failed to finish in the top 10 performing films. The movie stars Ed Harris and David Duchovny in the story of a Soviet submarine captain leading a secret mission.

“Identity Thief” was released by Universal Pictures, a unit of Comcast. “Snitch” was distributed by Summit Entertainment, a unit of Lions Gate Entertainment “Phantom” was released by privately held RCR Distribution.

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“21 & Over” feels like a reincarnation of last year’s equally asinine “Project X,” a movie that, like this one, was loaded with revolting characters and implausible scenarios that revolve around a night of severe partying. The plot is painfully simple: Accompanied by longtime best friends Casey (Skylar Astin) and Miller (Miles Teller), supposed brainiac Jeff Chang (Justin Chon) ignores his strict father’s commands not to go out on the night before his big med-school interview. Naturally, the three get sloshed, particularly Jeff, who is comatose as Casey and Miller race to get him home in time for his dad’s arrival the next morning.

Written and directed by the same guys who penned “The Hangover” (surprise, surprise), every note you would expect to hear in this movie resounds loudly. Casey is the studious, responsible type, while Miller is the miscreant who’s brimming with racist jokes and loathsome choices. As the night rages on, the two descend upon one ludicrous episode after the next in an effort to find Jeff’s address — why they don’t already know it is puzzling, to say the least — in order to make their deadline.

Along the way, we’re forced to endure the sight of slow-motion vomiting, Jeff eating a tampon and the characters finding the inevitable opportunity to fight, call the friendship quits and then — yawn — realize how foolish they’ve been. “21 & Over” is the standard version of the hyperbolic college-party movie, except without the wit of “Old School” or the lovability of “Animal House.” Thank goodness for Astin’s charm — without it, this shindig would be totally lifeless. (2 out of 5 Globes)

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Nicholas Hoult battles behemoths in “Jack the Giant Slayer.”
Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Today’s dominant blockbuster trend involves taking a beloved pop culture item and turning it into brooding, humorless pomp. Ours is an era in which not even “Snow White” can be fun. With such a literally sad state of affairs, it’s easy to overrate “Jack the Giant Slayer” for not featuring a hero who, say, holds back tears as he ascends a beanstalk against a booming Hans Zimmer score, all the while questioning who’s the real monster: the homicidal colossus hoping to stomp on humans or, you know, him?

Of course, the other extreme is even less palatable. The flip side to last year’s relentlessly dour “Snow White and the Huntsman” was the unwatchably arch (if gorgeous) “Mirror Mirror.” “Jack the Giant Slayer,” semi-inexplicably helmed by “X-Men” maven Bryan Singer, falls somewhere in the middle, albeit closer to the latter: silly without being obnoxious, light without being entirely inconsequential.

Melding two separate English folk tales about a guy named Jack — the one about a beanstalk and the less cherished “Jack the Giant Killer” — the film features not a lad but a Y.A. Jack (Nicholas Hoult, once the boy in “About a Boy,” of late an emo zombie in “Warm Bodies”), and instead of one giant and a golden egg, there’s a bunch of giants and no golden egg. But there is an Xtreme beanstalk.

It’s a funny feeling knowing that a mega-budgeted romp based on a slender folk tale seeks only to entertain. But don’t go nuts. There’s such a thing as being too light, and apart from some belated stampeding giant action, this “Jack” is forgettable, each moment out of the mind the instant it’s passed, and lacking in the Spielbergian set pieces for which it so clearly cries out. It’s wonderful that Jack isn’t an agonized depresso, but he winds up with no personality while the requisite parade of overqualified Brits and Scots — Ewan McGregor as a taciturn swordsman, Ian McShane as the king — strut about, underutilized.

“Jack”’s goals are noble: it’s been a while since a good old fashioned — and authentically gory — folk tale made the rounds. Singer’s film periodically meets those needs, with behemoths occasionally biting into human heads like one would a carrot. Such violence is tastefully elided by cuts, but even a partly failed and sanitized fairy tale is preferable to the next gloomy comic book picture about a sad, caped alien who can fly.

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