Here’s your one sentence pitch for “The Million Dollar Bet.”

A doesn’t-sweat-anything gambler talks “friends” into betting him that he can’t run 70 miles in 24 hours — in Vegas — with a sandstorm bearing down on Sin City.

You’ve got a gambling milieu, a couple of ticking clocks — the 24 hour “race” challenge, and the freak-event sandstorm (Vegas got a doozy of one in July of 2025) — inveterate gamblers, a life-threatening bet and a “true story” tag.

But true or not, collection of “colorful” if cliched characters and interesting stakes be damned, this thing never comes together.

Justin Cornwell plays Jack, a card player/gambler on a bit of a “run,” when the problems of his younger casino-trolling pal Hank (Douglas Smith) take a fresh turn.

Twentysomething Hank, out of shape but a “natural athlete,” wants Jack and others to make a “prop bet” on his ability to run the near-equivalent of three consecutive marathons in 24 hours.

The film starts to go wrong as the financing, the payout, the odds and the architecture of this bet is skimmed over and never explained. We know Jack doesn’t have that kind of cash. We know Hank doesn’t, but is fond of wild “prop bets” which are sometimes epic over-reaches.

As neither of them has a million bucks (it starts out at $150k) or a stake to put up, as others aren’t seen “getting in on the action,” where is the three-to-one odds payout coming from?

Hank’s a Vegas native, with a cranky, protective chain-smoking mom (Carrie Gibson), a dull stepdad (Todd Carroll) he ignores and a doting sister (Kristen Lee Gatoskie) who gave up the :dirty money” of casino card dealing for a new career in go-kart repair.

Jack tries to call Hank’s bluff, but he’d really hope he’ll talk himself out of this. Hank’s sister tries to convince him and his mother tries to order him to bail (and Jack to let Hank off the hook).

But Hank begins. He’ll need to average nearly three miles per hour, “no walking…taking as many breaks as I desire,” to manage 70 miles in 24 hours.

He’s doing 720 foot laps around the complex where he and Jack and “not taking sides” and not betting gambler pal Tony (Sean Rogers) live.

Colorful, cliched neighbors — the angsty, thinks-too-much tween, the nosy little old lady from across the street, the 50something shirtless Euro trash who rides his skateboard with his dog pulling it for exercise — track Hank and chat words of encouragement or discouragement.

Everybody pressures Jack to back down. An emergency room doc talks about how deadly it cam be for somebody out of shape to attempt a marathon in Vegas, much less nearly THREE marathons.

And that damned storm is coming.

I was halfway through “Million Dollar Bet,” taking notes on “dialogue that sounds ‘typed’ and not lived or spoken by living, breathing characters” before I realized it’s an Austrian production. So yes, English as a Second Language dialogue takes one out of this Thomas Woschitz film from time to time.

Cornwell, of TV’s “The In-Between,” has an interesting but not arresting screen presence.

“Guys, it’s a bet, not a funeral” was never going to pack a punch, and Cornwell soft sells it to boot.

Former child actor Smith (TV’s “Big Love” And “Big Little Lies”) shows us little that indicates edge, mania, cunning or even a character’s interior life.

The supporting players don’t register much more than that, but they’re not “carrying” the picture.

Woschitz has been around for a while — “Bad Luck” and “Universalove” are his best-known Austrian films — but he struggles to make even the simple ticking clock elements tick over.

And the payoff is more disappointing than the disappointments that precede it.

The pitch might have felt like a sure thing, but plot holes and cut rate casting made “Million Dollar Bet” a long shot all along.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Justin Cornwell, Douglas Smith, Kristen Lee Gatoskie, Sean Rogers, Billie Steiner, Todd Carrol, Dee Catrone and Carrie Gibson.

Credits: Directed by Thomas Woschitz, scripted by Andrea Liva and Thomas Woschitz. A Narrative Distribution release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:29

If aliens are out there watching our movies, they definitely think high school is some form of purgatory. They might be right. In this new Hulu comedy (releasing June 17), the 2008 class of a small-town high school finds out that they didn’t actually graduate. In their mid-thirties, this group of unhappy people has to return to North Meadows High to complete their last two weeks of school—and their regrets, failed romances, and other tortures are still waiting for them. 

Starring John Reynolds, Sofia Black-D’Elia, Carmen Christopher, Jo Firestone, and Gary Richardson, with Topher Grace, Never Change! is an absurdist comedy directed by Marty Schousboe and written by Reynolds that’s about being forced to change and facing demons. It’s also a movie that reminds me that humor is subjective. It’s apt in satirizing the intersections between who these characters hoped to be as teenagers and everything (absolutely everything) that went wrong afterward. Finding its truths in a combination of relatable moments and classic High School movie references, there’s something here that might’ve worked somewhere between Gross Pointe Blank and The Big Chill—maybe even The Four Seasons—all dialed up to the peaks of absurdity.

However, I was not amused. You know that meme where the choir sings, “What the hell!? What the hellie?” I am the meme. The gags keep gagging until they’re a choking hazard. But Richardson’s “Watch this” scene is incredible. And although the cast is up for whatever and the filmmakers go full stream-of-consciousness while telling a cohesive story, I wanted to spit this movie out. I admire what they’re going for but…Yeah, I think we’re done here.

It’s tempting to describe English novelist-turned-filmmaker Helen Walsh’s fine-grained gay love story On the Sea as another version of God’s Own Country, switching out Yorkshire farmland for coastal waters in North Wales. But that would be unfairly reductive. Like Francis Lee’s smoldering 2017 debut feature, this is a rugged, elemental drama whose slow-burn potency plays out against a landscape as bleak as it is beautiful, where taciturn men are locked into restrictive codes of masculinity set in stone generations ago. 

A palpable sense of place, of milieu and of working-class lives in which pleasure, passion and desire have been dulled courses through this atmospherically charged film like the icy seawater and rough currents of the straits. The unerring restraint of its leads never obscures the raw feelings of their sensitively drawn characters.

The middle-aged protagonist, Jack (Barry Ward), and his younger brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones) co-own a mussel farm, a hardscrabble enterprise being squeezed by larger commercial fisheries. Jack and Dyfan are the third generation of men in their family to endure the backbreaking work of hand-raking the mussel beds and crating their haul each day in bitterly cold winds. The attention to quotidian labor in harsh conditions at times calls to mind Luchino Visconti’s classic 1948 neorealist docudrama about dirt-poor Sicilian fishermen, La Terra Trema.

Friction between the brothers sits just under the surface from the start. Dyfan’s three boys pitch in with the work, unlike Jack’s surly teenage son Tom (Henry Lawfull), a repeated no-show. When Jack sends his brother’s youngest home because his hands are too frozen to be of use, Dyfan takes understated jabs at his manhood by saying he’s too soft on the lads, none more so than Tom. Dyfan later shows resentment about having kept the business afloat solo while Jack was undergoing treatment for cancer, now in remission. Theirs is not an easy fraternity.

When an incident for which Tom is indirectly responsible leads to old-timer Bernie (Danny Webb), who makes a living from his scallop dredger, having his leg amputated, Jack takes charge of the veteran fisherman’s care. He gets help — at first through his firm insistence, later voluntarily — from itinerant deckhand Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen); they chop firewood to heat Bernie’s home and take his boat out to make money to pay his bills.

The attraction between the two men at first is so veiled it’s almost undetectable, though Daniel is more obvious with his glances and the hints he drops into their terse conversations. Irish actor Ward (who played the title character in Jimmy’s Hall for Ken Loach) expertly conveys the unease of a man reading and responding to the stranger’s signals even as he feigns indifference, fearful of disrupting his life in a community suspicious of any digression from old-fashioned norms.

Paradoxically, it takes Daniel smacking Jack in the mouth after he allows the younger man to be humiliated in the pub to spur Jack into acting on his desires. The sex between them is fumbling, nervous and almost feral at first, then increasingly tender and uninhibited as they start stealing time together in Daniel’s trailer. When the connection between them intensifies, Daniel becomes unsatisfied with clandestine hookups, wanting more, while Jack’s self-denial and wariness of potential exposure are tough habits to kick. 

“This is my town,” Jack tells Daniel by way of explanation. “I live here.” But no less affecting is Daniel’s frustration when he asks of their relationship, “What is this?” The emotional inarticulacy of both men is quietly bruising.

A million conflicts play across Ward’s face, notably Jack’s longing for a more fulfilling life and the sudden reminder that, had he made more courageous choices, that might have been an option. In a scene of crushing sadness, he sees Daniel playing pool at the pub with another man, the intimacy of their body language unmistakable.

Jack’s biggest regret, however, is the hurt he stands to cause Maggie (Liz White), the wife he has genuinely loved since they were high school sweethearts. That hurt becomes an increasing inevitability once Dyfan starts making pointed comments about Jack’s younger friend helping him take care of Bernie despite hardly knowing the old man, or Jack and Daniel taking Bernie’s boat out for the day, with no evidence of any fishing being done. 

That homophobic Dyfan chooses to drop these insinuations over a dinner with his brother and their wives makes his behavior especially toxic, not to mention that his spite is driven in part by his maneuverings to buy out Jack’s share of the business.

Walsh is an assured storyteller, aided considerably by the gritty textures and searching close-ups of DP Sam Goldie’s camera, which shapes an alternate landscape from Jack’s lined, stubbly face, his calloused hands, bulky wool sweaters and water-slicked rubber waders. The cloudy skies cast much of the film in shadow, the chief exception being a rare patch of sunlight seen from underwater during a swim off Bernie’s boat. Or is it a memory of a much earlier time on holiday with Maggie, when she first had an inkling of her husband’s secret?

Unfolding to the regionally inflected sounds of Felix Rösch’s delicate score, On the Sea takes some unsurprising turns, sketched out in foreshadowing, but also less expected developments, particularly once Maggie gets past her anger and her rock-solid strength of character kicks in. Tom, too, after keeping a hostile distance from his father, makes a late display of loyalty that silences his uncle. And a scene in which Tom’s girlfriend (Leisa Gwenllian) exchanges friendly words with Jack at his most isolated is lovely.

Walsh is too subtle in her writing to concoct a happy ending in which everything falls into place. But there’s comfort and even a kind of peaceful deliverance in the stirring closing images of a film that stays with you.