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      ‘Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ and the Lessons Few Horror Films Get Right

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      Ti West is the rare genre director to understand the original and honor it with a movie, “X,” that also works on its own terms.Fifteen years ago, I sat down with 20 or so of the most prolific serial killers in the world, responsible for hundreds of stabbings, decapitations and other unspeakable murders — and was absolutely charmed. A get-together of directors of scary movies, including Wes Craven, Eli Roth, Larry Cohen, Don Coscarelli and Robert Rodriguez, this event, semi-jokingly referred to as “the masters of horror dinner,” was giddily jovial. Just as comedians tend to be more serious in person than you expect, horror artists are, generally speaking, very funny.The one time I recall the mood turning solemn was when discussion shifted to “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974). With its director, Tobe Hooper, shyly nibbling on his salad, everyone took turns describing the first time they watched this unlikely masterpiece. They spoke in vivid, awe-struck detail, as if recalling a religious epiphany.Of the classic horror movies of its era, none is more revered among genre filmmakers. Yet “Chain Saw” has been stubbornly hard to imitate in comparison with peers like “Night of the Living Dead” and “Halloween,” which spawned entire genres. You can detect the influence of “Chain Saw,” however, in a spate of recent movies, including Ti West’s “X,” a thrilling new indie from A24 that captures the disreputable pleasures of 1970s horror with slickly modern refinement.Brittany Snow in “X,” from Ti West. The film’s kinship with “Chain Saw” is clear from the visual vocabulary.A24The peculiar strengths of “Chain Saw” have rarely been replicated because they are often misunderstood. Despite its unsubtle title, this is a formally exquisite art film, packed full of gorgeously nightmarish images, as poetic as they are deranged. The movie is less bloody than its reputation. While every bit as intense as its title, its violence is staged with misdirection absent from the sequels and remakes.Another misperception, internalized even by experienced and admiring critics, involves its most famous character, Leatherface. In a Variety review last year, Owen Gleiberman drew the ire of horror fans when he called “Halloween” a “knockoff” of “Chain Saw,” then defended his stance in an essay locating the signature of both movies in the killer’s mask. “It expresses his identity,” he writes of Leatherface, “and his identity is that he has no identity.”Gleiberman was on solid ground with “Halloween,” whose killer is a psychology-less abstraction, murdering without motivation, but Leatherface is more than just a boogeyman. While he is introduced committing some of the most startling kills in cinematic history, the majestically maniacal last act of “Chain Saw” shifts our perspective on him from hulking slayer to stammering stooge. Without resorting to a tedious back story, the movie positions Leatherface as a monster and a victim, bullied into his dirty work by his cannibalistic family. He is closer to the misunderstood creature from “Frankenstein” than to a garden-variety slasher villain.The feat of “Chain Saw” is to make us empathize with its scariest figure without diminishing the disorienting, teeth-chattering horror. Few movies pull this off.In “Nightmare Alley,” Guillermo del Toro, a “Chain Saw” fan, has directed a movie that also introduces a terrifying figure, a circus geek, before making us question our original judgment. In turning his monster-movie preoccupations into prestige, humanist filmmaking, del Toro has lost some of the scares (and fun) along the way. His movie is worn down by its seriousness, only to come alive in a final scene that ends with a direct visual quotation from the memorable final close-up of “Chain Saw,” when the last survivor cries so hard she laughs.Marilyn Burns in the original “Chain Saw.” The ending has been quoted in movies like the recent “Nightmare Alley.”Bryanston Distributing/AlamyThe recent Netflix reboot of “Texas Chainsaw” has the opposite problem. It abandons the nuance of the original, adopting the Gleiberman view of Leatherface as a one-note killing machine. The result is a boringly rote series of slayings. More novel is the slickly entertaining “Fresh,” an urban horror story about the hell of modern dating in which a single woman meets the perfect guy, who it turns out isn’t. It takes places in a world seemingly distant from Texas massacres. But when the main character says he’s from Texas and his mother has died, horror die-hards will tense up in recognition. It’s a deft, disquieting little shocker, but unlike the 1974 “Chain Saw,” which has an unhinged spirit that even after many viewings makes you think anything could happen, the twists in “Fresh” are a little too predictable to really jar sensibilities.The best movies made in the spirit of “Chain Saw” grasp that the source of its deepest madness is the family dynamics. Rob Zombie’s gnarly Firefly trilogy (“House of 1000 Corpses,” “The Devils’ Rejects,” “3 From Hell”) and the original and remake of “The Hills Have Eyes” (both terrific) capture the relatable dread of a dysfunctional family, taken to a Grand Guignol extreme.The Netflix “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” forgoes the nuance of the original for a boringly rote set of kills.Yana Blajeva/NetflixTi West’s “X” centers on a confrontation with a disturbed rural family in 1970s Texas, an elderly couple who appear creepy and hostile, before their vulnerabilities are exposed and they also become poignant. The film’s kinship with “Chain Saw” is most obvious in its stunning visual vocabulary: The ominously vast blue sky, a strobe-light editing sequence, a long view of a screen door from inside a creaky house. There is the dread evoked by rusty tools and wrinkly skin — and even an echo of the scene of Leatherface doing a balletic spin.With these images, West is working the erogenous zones of horror fans. He can overdo it (we didn’t need the “Shining” reference), but while the contours of the plot are straight out of “Chain Saw” — city kids jump into a van heading into rural Texas before stumbling upon a house of horrors — he is smart enough to tell his own story.His sitting ducks are making a low-budget pornographic movie inspired by the success of “Debbie Does Dallas.” It helps to know that “Chain Saw” was made by a seedy New York company, Bryanston Distributing, that was flush from the success of the famous sex film “Deep Throat.” The line between horror and porn was blurry in the 1970s. They shared some of the same artists, audiences and grimy theaters. At a time when the reputation of scary movies was much lower, pornography was being taken seriously. This is the cultural backdrop of “X,” but also in part its subject, and the film keeps searching for the intersection between sex and violence. In one pointed sequence, West juxtaposes a scene of staged seduction with one of real menace, underlining the echoing tension.Mia Goth, left, Owen Campbell and Martin Henderson in the new film “X.”A24Paul A. Partain, left, Allen Danziger, Teri McMinn, Burns and William Vail in Tobe Hooper’s 1974 classic.Bryanston Distributing/AlamyWhereas “Texas Chain Saw” was about economic displacement (new technology cost Leatherface and his family their jobs at the slaughterhouse), “X” is about sexual displacement, how the old inevitably gives way to the young. The resentment this inspires is the fuel of the horror, which the victims don’t see coming. They are too busy trying to become famous making a film. The young, idealistic director of the sex picture just wants to make a “good dirty movie,” but tensions rise when his girlfriend tries to join the cast. He refuses, saying, disingenuously, that he can’t change the script. She counters that audiences care less about plot than about sex, asking: “Why not give the people what they’re paying for?”Even if Ti West identities with the director, he doesn’t give him the better argument.After making a series of elegant, slow-burn scary films like “The Innkeepers” and “The House of the Devil” that have earned critical praise if not blockbuster grosses, West has now made a movie full of flamboyantly gory kills and leering sex scenes. You might say he finally gives the horror crowd what they’re paying for. But instead of compromising his aesthetic, indulging in the traditional muck of the genre actually loosens and expands that aesthetic. His movies have long paid homage to the delirious blood baths of the grind-house era. But this is his first that feels like one.Horror has always been about repressed pleasures. Like comedy, it also depends on the shock of the unexpected. “Chain Saw” is a disreputable exploitation flick made with such artistry that it transforms into high art. “X” arrives in a different context, an era of so-called elevated horror and the kind of respectability that should make any gore-hound nervous. So West has reversed the trick. He made an A24 production with the spirit of a B movie. More

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      ‘Windfall’ Review: Money Talks

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      A wealthy couple is detained by an incompetent thief in this airless Netflix drama.If you can remain awake until the final moments of “Windfall,” then yes, something exciting actually happens. But that’s a very long wait in Charlie McDowell’s oppressive Netflix drama, a gabby hostage movie with a single, covetable location and three unappealing characters.A frozen opening shot of the exterior of a luxury California home forewarns of the tedium to come. A scruffy thief (played by Jason Segel at his most gormless) is poking languidly around the property, as if trying it on for size. He might be the most inept robber since the doofuses in “Home Alone,” but his lack of skills proves irrelevant when the home’s owners, a tech billionaire and his wife (Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins), return unexpectedly and acquiesce to his demands for money. More, they even encourage him to up his asking price.Shot in Ojai in 2020 (not far from where McDowell filmed his 2014 feature, “The One I Love”), “Windfall” is dramatically flat and logically wanting. As the three wait for the agreed-upon loot to arrive, the meandering script (by Justin Lader and Andrew Kevin Walker) includes a farcical sauna lockdown and a surprise visit from a luckless gardener. Multiple escape opportunities are ignored, especially by the wife, who spends most of the movie lounging and looking fed up. One can hardly blame her.Yet despite the shambolic plot and shuffling camera (briefly roused to a sprint during a woodland chase), Plemons digs beneath his character’s arrogance to unearth something like disgust — for his marriage, his money and his subjugation by a ridiculous interloper.“Why do we keep pretending this guy is an actual threat?,” he asks his wife, angrily. He should probably be asking the screenwriters.WindfallRated R for a greedy husband and a wife gone wild. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Intregalde’ Review: Oh, Be Good!

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      A Romanian satire charts what happens when some humanitarian aid workers set out to save others (and need to be saved themselves).Beware of laughing when watching “Intregalde” because your laughs will have a way of catching — and dying — in your throat. A sly, mordantly funny, at times brutal satire about altruism and its discontents, the movie offers something of an emotional workout. One minute you’re grooving on the story and the nice, warm feeling you get from watching Romanian charity workers dole out food and treats for Christmas. The next you’re squirming as they lose their bearings and their good intentions go ridiculously awry.At the heart of “Intregalde” is the tension between individual and community, and the age-old tug between self-interest and caring for others. What do we owe others? What do we owe ourselves? The movie doesn’t offer any obvious answers; it’s more interested in stirring the pot. But it still provokes the kind of searching questions that aren’t always asked outside of lecture halls, places of worship or newspaper columns. Yet, if you’re like me, I imagine that these are some of the very questions that — when you’re not hurriedly running on your gerbil wheels — haunt you, troubling your thoughts and sleep.The story takes place in a rural part of Romania that gives the movie its title, a sparsely populated area with beautiful hills, wide valleys, unpaved roads and a spooky loneliness. There, a group of boisterous volunteers from Bucharest has gathered to pass out donations to locals. The volunteers seem pumped with energy as they fill large plastic bags with cheese, cans of salmon and other offerings. The vibe is upbeat, almost giddy. The director Radu Muntean (he also co-wrote the script) plunges you right into the makeshift storehouse where the donations are hurriedly being gathered in an excited churn.As the camera energetically moves around the space, it at once catches the amped mood (as if it too were a volunteer) and discreetly nudges your attention toward individual people. Once they’ve loaded up, the volunteers clamber into muddied S.U.V.s, forming a humanitarian convoy to make the world a better place. You’re riding too, the camera having hitched along with some of these folks. They all look happy and seem smart and agreeable. But as they continue, drive on and off the road, admire the scenery, change cars and buy a sheep for a barbecue, they also come into lacerating focus.You settle in quickly with these characters, their smiles and the S.U.V.s’ tight spaces creating a kind of conspiratorial bond with them. The naturalistic dialogue is light on exposition, so you learn little about their backgrounds. Instead, they emerge through how they act and talk, most instructively with the locals. “It makes a difference to these people,” a charity worker says a bit too smugly after an early visit to a family. The visit goes fine, but the volunteers are overly familiar, and when they take a group photo with the recipients of their largess, I thought of how hunters pose with their prey.It gets worse, at times with painfully comic results, when the three workers you’re riding with drive deeper into the countryside. The light has begun to fade and the trees lining the road obscure the sky, darkening the scene and shifting the texture of the realism. The woman in the back, Maria (Maria Popistasu), asks her companions if they came this far last time. No, says Dan (Alex Bogdan), who’s riding shotgun. He owns the S.U.V., but Ilinca (Ilona Brezoianu) is driving. Then they see a small figure in the middle of the road. “Move it, Forrest Gump!” Dan jokes. “Mind you don’t hit him!” Maria yelps.The figure turns out to be Kente (Luca Sabin), a weathered old man with sunken cheekbones and a hawkish profile. Shabbily dressed in clothes that look inadequate for the fast-approaching night, he greets the aid workers, inaugurating an amusingly absurd, confusing conversation. Kente babbles on about a mill; the workers struggle to understand what he’s on about even as they try to explain what they’re doing. Everyone talks at cross purposes, fraying nerves. But when Kente asks for a lift, the workers agree, a decision that instigates a cascade of misadventures and sets the movie’s ethical course.Like Forrest Gump, Kente is an enigma, though considerably less cutesy. He seems addled and hapless, and may be cognitively challenged, but he’s also mulish, incoherent, exasperating and cunning. Is he a holy fool, a trickster or just a lost soul in need of saving? Whatever else he is, he becomes a wedge that rapidly changes the dynamic among the workers and frays their solidarity. Maria, Dan and Ilinca have opinions about Kente and what they should do with him, and nearly every one of their ideas is bad.The first time I watched “Intregalde,” I recognized in the workers the desire, however naïve or ill-conceived, to play savior. Yet while the movie can be read as a skewering of bourgeois do-goodism, Muntean doesn’t punish his characters and he doesn’t slap his viewers around for their complicity in the horror show we call the world. Watching it again recently, I now saw a movie that, with humor, tenderness and flashes of filmmaking brilliance, looks at what happens when kindness is tested, masks are dropped and self-interest runs free. It’s all a mess and so are we, which I think is very much to Muntean’s point.IntregaldeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In Romanian, with subtitles. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ahed’s Knee’ Review: A Filmmaker’s Agony in the Desert

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      Nadav Lapid’s new film, about a brooding director much like himself, is a howl of rage at the state of Israeli society.“Ahed’s Knee” is the Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s fourth feature film. The first three — “Policeman” (2014), “The Kindergarten Teacher” (2015) and “Synonyms” (2019) — are in their different ways works of social criticism. They take aim at what Lapid sees as modern Israel’s political, moral and spiritual shortcomings, focusing on characters whose personal agonies mirror the national crisis.Though its themes are the same, this movie is different. It’s a howl of rage. The person doing the howling isn’t exactly Lapid, but someone who might easily be mistaken for him: a filmmaker in his 40s working on a project called “Ahed’s Knee.” There are other biographical details that link this fellow, known only as Y (and played by the raggedly charismatic Avshalom Pollak), with his creator. He’s in close contact with his mother, who works on his films with him and who is dying of lung cancer. Lapid’s mother, Era, who died of that disease in 2018, was his regular editor.The plot of “Ahed’s Knee” arises from a professional conflict that really happened to Lapid. (Y’s project is based on a more public event: a widely reported confrontation between Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager, and Israeli soldiers in 2017.) There’s no doubt that this is, in several senses, a personal film. But that doesn’t mean that the character is simply the author’s mouthpiece; one of the things that gives this movie its raw, unbalanced energy is the indeterminacy of the distance between them.Y has a habit of standing too close. This is evident as soon as he meets Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a young woman who has organized a screening of one of his films. She is a big fan of his work, and also an employee of the Ministry of Culture, commitments that turn out not to be entirely compatible. The immediate, unnerving intensity that springs up between them is both a portent and a misdirection. Will this turn into the story of a troubled artist finding a new muse, or perhaps a #MeToo parable of male entitlement run amok?Both seem plausible, but what happens is more unsettling. Y’s movie is being shown at a public library in a village in the Arava, a sparsely populated, austerely beautiful desert region in southern Israel. Y, who is (like Lapid) from Tel Aviv, has never been there before. The strangeness of the landscape and the blazing heat may contribute to his emotionally volatile state, but what pushes him to the edge is a document Yahalom asks him to sign. It’s a list of approved topics for his post-screening talk, and a promise that he’ll stick to them.Is this a bureaucratic formality or a sign of creeping fascism? Yahalom’s request seems to confirm Y’s darkest suspicions about Israel’s drift away from democracy and cultural vitality, a brooding, passionate pessimism that will be familiar to anyone who has seen Lapid’s previous films. Unlike other politically minded Israeli filmmakers, he doesn’t concentrate on the Palestinian conflict or on the simmering culture war between Israel’s secular and religious citizens. When those matters come up, they appear as symptoms of a larger, less easily defined malaise having to do with the sacrifice of Jewish ethical norms, political ideals and intellectual traditions on the altars of power and materialism.There is something deeply conservative about this attitude, even if Lapid’s allegiances — and Y’s — are clearly on the left. The difference between the two directors might just be that Lapid gives vent to his despair by making a movie — with beautiful, hallucinatory shots of the Arava and splinters of comic absurdism — whereas Y throws a tantrum, alienating his audience and humiliating his biggest fan.Or: the real filmmaker retreats into his art, whereas his fictional counterpart is bold enough to make a scene, hurt some feelings and possibly risk his own comfort and career. Neither one asks to be taken as a hero. Y, on a dating app during the pre-screening reception, boasts to a potential companion that he won a prize at the Berlin Film Festival. That’s where “Synonyms” was awarded the Golden Bear. The privileges granted to artists can always be held against their art, and so can their personalities. It’s possible to reach the end of “Ahed’s Knee” with just one question in mind: What is this guy’s problem? The answer is complicated, because it isn’t only one guy’s problem.Ahed’s KneeNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love After Love’ Review: Elegance Without a Center

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      Ann Hui’s World War II-era film is lovely to look at but lacks emotional depth and resonance.Early on in “Love After Love,” the director Ann Hui introduces the viewer to an astonishing shade of green, an emerald lushness that radiates from the foliage surrounding a Hong Kong mansion on the eve of World War II. If only the rest of the overlong feature were so memorable.“Love After Love” is Hui’s 30th film, and an adaptation of a short story by the novelist Eileen Chang, whose fiction she has now used in three films. Hui, who rose to prominence as a director of the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, has been less well-known in the West.This film is a sufficient showcase for Hui’s craftsmanship, but it lacks the emotional depth or resonance that its composed visuals, lofty setting, and melodramatic stakes would portend.The film, streaming now on Mubi, shows sympathy for its young protagonist Ge Weilong (Sandra Ma), who comes from Shanghai to live and work for her cold, aristocratic Aunt Liang (Faye Yu) in Hong Kong while pursuing an education. Attending the banquets and high-society functions of Hong Kong’s international upper class, her aunt’s social circle, Weilong unwittingly finds herself under the gaze of George (Eddie Peng), a former lover of her aunt’s with an outsize Don Juan persona.What could make for a captivating story involving a transgressive love triangle is, even on a micro level, ineffective. Interactions between characters feel hollow, no matter how well-lit or well-cast the scenes are, with a passionless non-ending that has little of substance to say about the period or its social morés. Nevertheless, the bright spots in “Love After Love” may encourage viewers to seek out more robust works in Hui’s cherished oeuvre.Love After LoveNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Alice’ Review: American Slavery and Black Power Collide

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      This time-bending thriller about a woman who escapes from slavery in 1973, starring Keke Palmer and Common, is a vapid historical romp.In “Alice,” a coming-of-age revenge thriller from the writer-director Krystin Ver Linden, the eponymous main character (Keke Palmer, “Akeelah and the Bee,” “Hustlers”) successfully flees an abusive enslaver (Jonny Lee Miller) only to discover the year is actually 1973. Yes, 1973, and she and her fellow “domestics” have been trapped in a century-old bubble on a Georgia plantation, where not much has changed since Emancipation.The events that the movie says it is inspired by reportedly date back to the 1960s, but Ver Linden pushes the clock forward to the Blaxploitation era so that she can achieve her fait accompli: After reading a stack of encyclopedias provided by her savior and sidekick, Frank (Common), and taking marching orders from Pam Grier in “Coffy,” Alice morphs into an Afro-sporting Black Power heroine ready to free her kin back on the plantation and exact revenge on her white captors.Ver Linden wants us to view Alice as an empowered freedom fighter. Instead she lands as a caricature of one, as the film never really metabolizes or unpacks its conceit: the bonkers time-traveling predicament of its protagonist.Instead we’re made to sit through a microwave-dinner version of Black history — from slavery to civil rights to the Black Power movement — all while Palmer’s character shouts inadvertently comedic one-liners at her white enslavers like, “I don’t give a damn about your life!” Aside from the steadying cinematography (Alex Disenhof) and a few moments when Palmer leans into the more subtle aspects of her range, “Alice” takes the historic struggles for Black freedom in America and exploits them in the most vapid ways possible.AliceRated R for racial slurs, violence, torture and sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Panama’ Review: Welcome to the Jungle, We Lack Fun and Games

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      Mel Gibson drops in from time to time in this predictable throwback thriller from Mark Neveldine.There is absolutely no need to brush up on geopolitics for Mark Neveldine’s macho thriller “Panama,” which might be a blessing: This over-plotted yet utterly predictable throwback is set in the waning days of Manuel Noriega’s presidency, when sorting out the C.I.A.’s allegiances in Central America was trickier than playing three-card monte. The movie is more interested in resurrecting the spirit of action flicks from the late 1980s, a time when men were brutes, women were pawns or eye candy, and declarative assertions passed for dialogue. “Nothing more rock ‘n’ roll,” Mel Gibson’s Stark whoops here, “than taking out the bad guys for the red, white and blue!”Gibson is only onscreen for a few scenes, abiding by the current career playbook used by actors of his generation who like an easy paycheck. The heavy lifting (and glowering, and killing) is done by Cole Hauser’s Becker, a dour Marine who, when not gunning people down, spends his time drinking on his wife’s grave. Once enlisted by Gibson’s character to acquire a Soviet helicopter for the Contras, Becker discovers to his grim satisfaction that he and the rebel fighters share a bottomless hunger for revenge — an appetite for destruction, one might say, particularly if that one person were the Contra leader in this movie who, while playing air guitar on a rifle, screams, “Welcome to the jungle!”“Panama” should be more fun, given that Neveldine was a writer and director of the giddily moronic “Crank” films, which he made alongside Brian Taylor. (This movie was written by William Barber and Daniel Adams.) But it’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance. There is a slow-motion shot of a snow leopard, sound-tracked by hair metal. It is delivered without a lick of ironic wit.PanamaRated R for brutal fracas and repeated references to rape. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Outfit’ Review: The Violent Measure of a Man

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      In this gangster exercise set in 1956 Chicago, Mark Rylance plays a tailor who has very large scissors and some sharp moves.The gangsters in “The Outfit” have plenty of tough moves, but none of these guys hold the screen like Mark Rylance when he just stands or stares — or sews. His character, Leonard, is a bespoke tailor who once worked on Savile Row and now practices his trade in an unassuming shop in Chicago. There, he snips and stitches with a bowed head and delicate, precisely articulated movements that express the beauty and grace of Rylance’s art.Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches “The Outfit,” a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It’s a nostalgia-infused genre exercise set in 1956 that centers on Leonard, who, having left London after the war, now makes suits for a clientele that includes underworld types, some of whom use his shop for business. Day after day, he works in his somber, claustrophobic store while dodgy types parade in and out, dropping envelopes in a locked box. Like the box, Leonard is a mystery that the movie teases out one hint at a time.Leonard takes longer to open, although the box’s contents are central to the puzzle that also involves a clandestine recording, a secret romance, rampaging rival crews and the larger mysterious criminal enterprise that gives the movie its title. There’s also Leonard’s employee, Mabel (Zoey Deutch), one of two women in the mix; Nikki Amuka-Bird also pops in as a glamorous villain. For the most part, Mabel is around to greet the customers and brighten up the store’s gloomy interior: She smiles at one villain (Dylan O’Brien), gives the cold shoulder to another (Johnny Flynn) and so on.The director Graham Moore and his screenwriting partner, Johnathan McClain, move their limited pieces around, spill the requisite blood and modestly complicate the proceedings. The story is self-aware, chatty and thin; it plays out as an extended cat-and-mouse, though who’s who in this particular duet shifts over time, if not all that surprisingly. Mostly, the movie seems like it was concocted by a couple of cinephiles who wanted to play with genre for genre’s sake. And why not? That’s as fine a reason as any to dust off some fedoras and hire actors of varying abilities for some retro American gangster cosplay on a British soundstage.“The Outfit” basically consists of characters moving in, out and through the store’s two main rooms, spatial limitations that can feel stagy and be tricky to manage. This is Moore’s feature directing debut (he wrote “The Imitation Game”) but, working with the director of photography Dick Pope, he handles the space thoughtfully. With a muted palette, shifts in the depth of field and complementary staging and camera moves, Moore and Pope map the store’s (and story’s) geography from different vantage points. And, in sync with Rylance’s finely calibrated performance, they insure Leonard remains the visual axis.Rylance put on a fright wig to play William Kunstler in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and wore Mr. Ed-size choppers for his role as the eccentric zillionaire in “Don’t Look Up.” But he’s a master of restraint and he doesn’t need accessories to hold you as he proved with his mesmerizing turn in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies.” Rylance’s role here isn’t as rich, but one of the attractions of “The Outfit” is that it allows him to etch his character in pockets of filigreed solitude. Leonard’s focused yet effortless meticulousness when he works — how his hands smooth the fabric and control his enormous shears — define this man more than any line of dialogue. You also get to see Rylance engaging with a worthy foil.That would be Simon Russell Beale, who plays Roy, a gangland boss. Roy enters about midway through the movie. By then, bullets have been fired and blood has splashed across the floor, developments that are nowhere as ominous or tense as watching Leonard and Roy have a polite little talk in the back. Beale has the more overtly showy role. But like Rylance, he builds his characters through meticulously orchestrated moderation — vocal and physical — that faint smile by smile, hushed word by word, shifts the very particles in the air. Together, Rylance and Beale create a little world and a movie within a movie that’s worth watching.The OutfitRated R for gun violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More