Successful romances star at least one looker. I don’t mean someone attractive. I mean an actor who gazes at their scene partner with such delight that we swoon, too. Clark Gable was a looker. Diane Keaton was a looker. The combined eyeball voltage of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone is so powerful that it’s turned silly scripts into hits.

Harry Melling is a late-blooming looker. Onscreen most of his youth as the Muggle brat Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” franchise, Melling is only just now getting to show off that talent in the funny-kinky “Pillion,” which puts him on his knees beaming up at Alexander Skarsgård’s 6-foot-4 biker as though this blond hunk was the sun. His Colin, a shy gay man who sings the high notes in a barbershop quartet, is so visibly infatuated licking Skarsgård’s leather boots in a dark alley that you believe he lusts for humiliation. Colin has only just discovered that fact about himself. He’s yet to even learn this man’s name. (It’s Ray.)

Perhaps you’d like to be taken to dinner first, but “Pillion” is about Colin’s needs — specifically his need to please — and first-time feature filmmaker Harry Lighton challenges us to root for his bliss. This fetishy adventure is a minimalist romantic comedy in which submissive meets dominant, and submissive explores his physical and emotional vulnerabilities. Marriage and a baby carriage are off the table; the journey matters, not the destination.

“Pillion” is what motorcyclists call the passenger seat, at least in suburban England where this is set. It’s a passive position compared to the driver, but still a cooler upgrade from where Colin starts the movie riding in: the rear of a sedan. Out the car’s back window, he sees Ray zoom by in white Stormtrooper-looking gear and, by happenstance, bumps into him that night at a pub where Colin’s mother, Peggy (Lesley Sharp), has set up a blind date with a nice bloke. That guy gets forgotten the instant Ray slips Colin a note with a time and place to meet.

Peggy isn’t panicked by her son’s alpha-male predilections. “I think a biker sounds exciting,” she says with a grin. His father, Pete (Douglas Hodge), just wants him to wear a helmet. Neither parent is privy to the fact that Ray simply isn’t very nice. Ray controls the gobsmacked Colin quietly, calculating the bare minimum of kindness required to have a house boy willing to cook dinner, tend to his Rottweiler and sleep on the floor. He withholds his approval to keep the paler, smaller man anxious.

That Rottweiler contended for the Palm Dog at last year’s Cannes, a prize for the festival’s best canine. Frankly, Melling himself should have won. His performance is pure puppy, from the way he silently studies Ray’s silent cues to the eagerness with which he leaps up to fetch Ray a beer. When Ray lavishes attention on another biker’s pet pillion, Kevin (Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters), Colin sulks until his master unzips his trousers and gives him a treat.

Flexing his abs in shiny Motoralls, Skarsgård uses his own appeal to expose an unattractive wrinkle in human behavior: Ray is so gorgeous that everyone just takes it as fact that Colin is lucky to be near him. When a coworker asks this scrawny geek how he bagged a hunk like Ray, Colin brags that he has “an aptitude for devotion,” which includes wearing a padlock around his neck and shaving his Byronesque curls so that he looks like a zealot — which in a way, he is.

Over and over, Colin takes stock of his own debasement. But then he looks at his model-handsome lover and calculates that his suffering is worth it. He’s good at compartmentalizing; he’s a parking violations attendant who tickets angry people all day. When he needs an excuse to cry, he finds one (and it hurts to watch).

Lately, it’s been a thrill to see queer stories confidently leapfrog over coming-out narratives to the trickier question of whether two individuals in particular are a decent match. Lighton leaps further than that — he goes full Evel Knievel by daring to ask how we feel about a relationship that’s indecent, but still has worth as a set of training wheels for a wobbly young man learning what he wants.

It’s a more optimistic take on Colin and Ray’s coupledom than was in the book that inspired the script, Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novella “Box Hill,” which was subtitled “A Story of Low Self-Esteem.” A study of the psychology of abuse, that story’s more brainwashed version of Colin finds him decades older looking back on the affair and pining for a relationship that reads as horrible between the lines.

Lighton isn’t oblivious to the power imbalance, but he’s made a movie about going forward, not being stuck. He trusts his naif with more agency, and so “Pillion” is freer to play its insults for laughs. You’ll giggle a lot. That gleam in Melling’s eyes makes it feel like a comic fantasy, although who knows? Perhaps there really are BDSM biker gangs hosting afternoon picnics with serving boys tied spread-eagled on a buffet table. That bucolic scene is filmed in a slow pivot around the park, cinematographer Nick Morris getting a chuckle from how the image shifts from Georges Seurat to “Hellraiser.”

Eventually, Colin’s parents will be more flinchy about his new boyfriend, leading to a beat or two that don’t land with the impact they could. Oddly, Lighton might be too restrained himself. Like his leads, he prefers to say everything with a look.

But while Melling is always endearingly open and responsive, Skarsgård stays unreadable. His Ray always seems to be hiding behind a motorcycle visor even when he’s not and when he deigns to speak, the words trail off in a huff of exhaustion. The only thing we know about Ray’s life are the names of his two previous dogs, and that’s only because he has them tattooed on his chest.

Any more personal facts about Ray — his own job or family or romantic history, even his favorite movie — would risk us clinging onto it too tightly as an explanation of what he gets out of this himself. Serving Ray’s pleasure is Colin’s focus. And our focus is on Colin’s pursuit of that.

Yet with subtle skill, Skarsgård reveals that Ray is thinking about Colin more than he’s willing to let on. Curiosity flickers across his face when his submissive surprises him. He stays gruff, of course, but you sense that Ray is as manacled by his authoritarian role as Colin literally is in his hungry, slurping devotion to his master. Puny and pathetic as Colin appears, he begins to seem like the braver of the two. It takes courage to map your own boundaries — then to cross over that line and get hurt, and get back up and out there. Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.

I’ve been watching Renny Harlin’s three-film reboot of “The Strangers” for several years, because that’s how it was foisted upon us, and now that it’s finally over, I’m willing to give it some credit. It was an ambitious idea to turn a classic home invasion thriller into a gigantic pre-planned slasher trilogy. The filmmakers could have phoned the whole thing in and nobody would have blamed them. Heck, given how it all turned out, phoning it in might have been the better plan. But instead they tried something and they deserve an “A” for effort. And a “D” for everything else.

If you’re just now joining us, the original “The Strangers” was an efficient, tightly-edited home invasion thriller about a young couple attacked by three masked murderers. Why? Because they were home. The ambiguity was the point. It was a horror movie where the horror could happen to anyone, for any reason, at any time, and it was scary as hell. There was an excellent sequel called “The Strangers: Prey at Night,” but when that didn’t set the box office on fire, the studio rebooted the franchise with an inefficient, extremely padded trilogy that revealed everything about the killers and ruined their mystique. They say “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” and they didn’t. They just broke it, seemingly on purpose.

Madelaine Petsch stars as Maya. She was attacked in “Chapter 1,” she ran from the killers in “Chapter 2,” and it sounds like there should be more to her story after two films but there really isn’t. When we catch up to Maya in “The Strangers — Chapter 3” she’s celebrating her first proper victory, having finally killed Pin-Up Girl, one of the three title murderers (she wore the “Pin-Up Girl” mask, try to keep up). Unfortunately for Maya, the leader of the slasher cabal had a romantic thing going with Pin-Up Girl, so now Scarecrow (the one in the scarecrow mask) has weird desires for Maya. He doesn’t want to kill her anymore. He wants her to be the new Pin-Up Girl, which means he has to turn her into a serial killer and make her fall in love with him.

That’s a creepy idea. Horror protagonists have been losing their sanity since the dawn of the genre, and several slasher series already tried to get away with a seemingly stalwart hero turning to the dark side, or at least feeling tempted. “Halloween” tried it a couple times. The “Scream” movies feinted in that direction. Heck, “Saw” made it their whole gimmick after a while. The trick is to put the hero through so much hell that hell becomes their new normal. When their sense of identity shatters they could glom onto anything, even evil, just to make sense of it all. I’m not sure that’s good psychology but it’s an unsettling notion, at any rate.

But if that story was going to work we’d have to believe it, and that’s where “The Strangers — Chapter 3” falls flat. Madelaine Petsch barely had a character to play in the first place, and three films later there’s still very little evidence that she’s playing a real human being. Heck, it was hard to believe she was even scared until the second film. It doesn’t help that everyone else in the cast plays arch, unconvincing archetypes, and it really doesn’t help that the villains’ backstories are perfunctory and shallow.

You can’t shatter the audience’s reality, let alone the hero’s, without establishing reality in the first place, and Harlin’s trilogy is too phony to qualify. A character-driven storyline only works if the characters have character, and a plot-driven storyline doesn’t work if you can’t sell the plot. There’s a scene in “The Strangers — Chapter 3” where Scarecrow finally takes his mask off and an audience member gasped, as if it was a big reveal. But there was already a whole, long scene earlier in the movie where that guy talked about being the killer. The scene had such vague dialogue and monotonous acting and generic filmmaking that the plot point didn’t register the first time.

In my review of “The Strangers — Chapter 1” I talked about how the original film’s title referred not just to the murderers, but also the protagonists, who thought they knew each other but didn’t. (In my review of “Chapter 2” I talked about food poisoning. These movies really wore me down.) As we finally, finally put this whole whoopsie-daisy to bed I find myself wondering who “The Strangers” really were in this reboot trilogy. They can’t be the masked killers. We got to know them too well. And “The Strangers” can’t be the victims, because the victims aren’t complicated enough to be unknowable.

So I’m forced to conclude, in the end, that the strangers in Renny Harlin’s “The Strangers” are the people who thought this was a good idea. They watched one of the scariest movies of the 21st century, made an itemized list of everything that made it work, then ignored those lessons. It’s genuinely hard to fathom. They didn’t even go in a wild new direction. They just tried to do the same schtick, but longer and worse, and let’s face it, “longer and worse” is only the goal if you’re trying to torture somebody. 

Wait, was that the point this whole time? Was this supposed to be torture? Mission accomplished, I guess. What a strange mission.

One question has bothered Martin Ludlow in his decades as a concert and event promoter in Los Angeles. In a city packed with excellent jazz musicians, and a century of history with the genre, why is there no local equivalent of the massive festivals that cities like Montreal, New Orleans or Montreux, Switzerland, have built? One where the music transforms clubs, restaurants and parks across the city for nights on end?

This summer’s inaugural LA Jazz Festival in August will be the biggest push in a generation to build that here. Ludlow’s event — which melds his passion for jazz with the logistics muscle of his former life as a city councilman and labor leader — hopes to draw 250,000 fans across the city for a month of concerts culminating in a stadium-sized show on Dockweiler Beach. It will be one of the largest such events in the world, and the biggest Black-owned fest of its kind.

“This festival is intended to lift up our ancestors that came to this country in bondage, terrorized, brutalized,” Ludlow said outside City Hall on Wednesday. “It’s also about celebrating the end to those last bastions of Jim Crow racism, the days we were denied access to public drinking fountains, public swimming pools and public beaches. From the beginning of this journey, we’ve been very intentional about telling the narrative of that human rights struggle called Jazz.”

Flanked by Mayor Karen Bass, City Council members Heather Hutt, Traci Park and Tim McOsker, and jazz figures including Ray Charles Jr. and Pete Escovedo, Ludlow promised a galvanizing occasion for L.A.’s local jazz scene and the city’s wobbly tourism economy. That jazz scene has welcomed new investments like Blue Note L.A., and lamented beloved clubs like ETA closing.

This festival, however, hopes to be more on a scale with forthcoming mega-events such as the World Cup and the Olympics. The 25-day event in August will sprawl all over the region, with free park concerts in all 15 council districts, and 150 late-night shows at clubs and restaurants across the city. A Caribbean street fair highlighting the African and Latin roots of jazz will hit El Segundo, along with guided tours of historic Black coastal sites like Bruce’s Beach and Inkwell beach.

The fest culminates in a two-day concert on Dockweiler Beach that hopes to draw 40,000 fans a night. While a lineup is still in progress, the scope of Ludlow’s ambition is formidable — the fest will ban fossil fuels from its footprint, and earned a strong vouch from the California Coastal Commission. For decades, the Playboy Jazz Festival (now the Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival) was the defining event for the music in Los Angeles; this could eclipse it several times over.

“Martin, I’ve been on this 15-year journey with you. Through all of the ups and downs, I’m so excited this is the year,” Mayor Bass said at Wednesday’s event at City Hall debuting the festival. “This is the Los Angeles that will welcome the world. One of the best things we have to offer is all of our culture.”

Ludlow is a colorful figure in Los Angeles politics, a former council member and L.A. County Federation of Labor executive who pleaded guilty to misappropriating funds in 2006. He’s since delved deep into community activism and embarked on a successful third act as a concert and event promoter, throwing socially-conscious events with his firm Bridge Street, which has produced shows for Stevie Wonder, The Revolution, Sheila E and Snoop Dogg along with civic events like the ceremony renaming Obama Boulevard in Los Angeles.

“During this journey, you can only imagine there’s a lot of highs and a lot of lows,” Ludlow said. “When you have those lows, you want a friend that really can lift you up.” He had plenty of them onstage with him Wednesday announcing what could be a new flagship event for jazz in Los Angeles.